


In All the World

by LinearA



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: All the major character deaths happen before the story starts, Alternate Universe - Buffy The Vampire Slayer Fusion, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Between inhumanly strong people, Bisexual Ben Solo, Blood Drinking, Chronic Pain, Come Marking, Dirty Talk, F/M, Hallucinations, Light Dom/sub, Masturbation, Mirror Sex, Most of them are Buffy characters, Needles, No Lore Required, Oral Sex, Orgasm Denial, Past Ben Solo/Tai, Past Torture, Power Play, Rey Nobody, Rough Sex, Slight stalker vibes, Under-negotiated Kink, bisexual rey, in the 90s the vampires were adolescence, mention of drug use, mention of suicide, minor animal death, now they're capitalism, pop culture references for the Extremely Online, who's the dom who's the sub who's to say who wants to know?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:20:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 17
Words: 98,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23832259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LinearA/pseuds/LinearA
Summary: Of course Rey hates her day job.  But she didn't ask for this night shift, either: an unpaid gig fighting the forces of evil with pointy wooden sticks.  She doesn't want to risk her life fighting vampires; she wants a living wage and health insurance and her parents back.  She's old, to be a Slayer, and she's nobody, and New York doesn't evenhavea Hellmouth.Yet.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 809
Kudos: 442
Collections: Queerly Beloved Reylo Fics





	1. One Girl

**Author's Note:**

> This is technically speaking both a crossover and an AU -- it takes place in the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but at the end of Season 4 things... go differently. 
> 
> Do I have a plot in place? Kind of.  
> Do I know the themes? Mostly.  
> Will I finish it? Unclear.  
> Why am I writing it? Poor impulse control and bad time management skills.

There isn’t a dress code.

That’s about all Rey can say for the office. It’s “open plan,” which is to say that it’s a desolate room on the Red Hook end of the Gowanus Canal without anything approaching temperature controls, and the desks are folding tables with four workers at each. (Are they workers? Writers? Typists? Back-alley plastic surgeons of content, taking in news and sending it out to stalk the internet, mutilated beyond recognition? Technically, of course, they’re contractors, or consultants, whichever leaves them with the least rights and the fewest benefits.)

There are “free snacks,” but Platt makes sure every new hire hears the story of the guy who got fired for taking more than one pack of Cheetos in one day. They have to bring their own computers. Rey’s got a ten-year-old iBook with a refurbished SSD and a shell held together with packing tape after the battery warped and cracked the plastic. She hopes Platt’s standing nearby on the day it finally explodes.

Because of course the worst part is Platt himself. If he just underpaid them, it would be miserable. But he makes it miserable and humiliating. Every payday they’re called into his office (the only place a space heater does any good) while he reads off their hours and their Chartbeat stats. He hands over the check, then, and asks if they understand why it isn’t higher. Makes them agree that hustle is the most important thing for a writer to have. Asks them what they plan to do to improve.

The only answer he accepts is “Hustle harder.”

But there’s no dress code. So there’s that. 

Long hours, humiliation, pitiful pay, and no benefits, but at least she can wear leggings. Then on a particularly grey and shitty September Thursday, Tito tells her, not for the first time, that if she really wants the hits she should make a listicle of shots of her ass. She goes home and looks at her two pairs of jeans, and her single pair of interview slacks. Consultants don’t have sexual harassment protections. 

She has a bottle of two-buck Chuck for dinner. Every time she pours a little more into her glass she thinks about how she should be writing a long-form, working on a pitch, a personal essay, _something._ But all she can really latch onto on is a vision of kicking Tito and Platt into the canal and leaving them to choke on the Superfund sludge.

 _Your parents wouldn’t be proud of you,_ a reproving voice in her head says, and then she falls asleep.

It’s past midnight when Rey wakes up. Not scared, exactly, though she dreamt of blood and death. She feels wired, like she drank a gallon of coffee, which is bad, because she has to be up at five if she’s going to get in to the office before six, which she has to, because she needs to have six new pieces to tweet out at twenty-minute intervals to attract the bored commuter audience during rush hour.

Her chest is heaving, so she gets out of bed and tries to tire herself out, or at least put her sudden burst of energy to use. She holds a plank until she gets bored, and does deep squats for ten minutes. It doesn’t seem to touch her, or the weird energy that’s thrumming through her. She tries to do a pull-up, digging her fingers into the little ledge of the bathroom door’s frame.

The frame cracks. She drops, a broken strip of wood clutched in her hands.

She doesn’t think about what she does after that, which is pull on her shoes and go out into the street. If anybody were there to ask her why she does it, she might say that she smelled something funny. Or that she dreamt about hunting. Neither of which is a very good reason for going out into the Brownville streets at one in the morning in September in a tee shirt, leggings, and tennis shoes, clutching a chunk of broken door frame. She still feels that same numb, untouchable feeling, like it’s all a video game someone else is playing.

Or maybe she’s still dreaming, because a man’s voice behind her says, “Hello, sweetheart.”

And maybe this is how she gets mugged the one time she’s not carrying even five dollars. Or maybe Platt’s come to tell her that if she had hustle, she’d be at work right now. Or maybe it’s her dad, who always called her _sweetheart._ She thinks she remembers that.

But no. It’s just some wispy blond twerp who looks like he’s trying to start a record label with his parents’ money. Only instead of sitting at home wanking over his expensive editing equipment, or thirsting in Brandy Jensen’s mentions, or whatever a man like him normally does at the hour, he’s out here. Staring at her.

“Do you need something?” she asks him pointedly. “Directions to the A? Friendly life advice on talking to girls? Because calling strange women ‘sweetheart’ is really not it, chief, and – “ 

His face changes. Not his expression: his _face._ With a terrible crunch of shifting bone, his eyes sink and his cheeks warp and his brow hardens and she’s not looking at a human being anymore. He’s a yellow-eyed, white-fanged, slavering predator, and he’s lunging straight for her.

She doesn’t question her own impulse to lunge forward, not away; she doesn’t question how she knows where the heart is; she doesn’t consider the convenience of the sharp shard of wood in her hand; all she thinks is _my leggings have endured so fucking much – now blood, too?_

But there is no blood. There isn’t even a corpse, heavy and smelly and likely to draw Law & Order-type attention. There’s just a fine cloud of dust, which briefly holds the shape of a man before Rey stumbles through it on momentum and scatters it on the asphalt of Throop Ave.

She stands there for a long minute, waiting. The wind picks up, chilling her and ruffling the strings of the curbside trash bags. Rey waits. A horn honks, somewhere. Rey waits. When a sleepy-eyed man with an eager dog gives a wide berth to the crazy white girl with the pointy stick, Rey starts to realize that she’s not waking up any time soon, and grips her broken wood tighter, wondering what the fuck this dream is going to throw at her next.

“So you’re the girl,” says a low, dark voice out of the darkness, and all the hairs on the back of Rey’s neck stand on end.

“What girl?” The splintered edges of her accidental weapon dig into her hand.

He steps from the shadow of a stoop, tall and pale, with loose dark hair and a fencer’s rapid stride and a long Modigliani face. “The only one in all the world.”

“What am I, _XX: The Last Woman?”_ Rey has extremely mixed feelings about this dream. He’s coming closer. There’s a scar down his face that runs like a rivulet down his throat until it disappears into the collar of his tidy gingham shirt; the wind is cold but his sleeves are rolled up to show off long, corded forearms.

“There’s a demon inside you.”

“What are _you,_ my therapist?” Not that she can afford a therapist. Or needs one. Or would want one who’d look at her with liquid dark eyes and purse his wide soft mouth like that.

“They don’t like to tell you that part,” he says. “It makes them uncomfortable. Them and the girls.”

They’re almost toe-to-toe. “I thought you said I was the only one. The only girl.”

That soft mouth hardens into a shape something like a smile. “The only one, but not the first.”

“Here I thought I was special.” She says it lightly. She’s never special.

His face is serious again. “You are special. And someone had to die for it to happen.”

“What?” Her blood runs cold. She doesn’t care about his mouth anymore; she doesn’t like this dream. “What happened? Who?”

No answer. “Just remember. Later. What you’re made of. Demons and death.” He leans in so close she could lick his cheek if she wanted to, _which she doesn’t._ “Just like me.”

There’s a car coming, something quiet, the engine nearly silent but the wheels hissing as it speeds. It almost screeches into its stop at the corner, then hurtles towards them in a glare of headlights. _Maybe if the car hits me, I’ll wake up,_ Rey thinks. But it stops, six feet short of her, and a woman who’s considerably short of six feet jumps out.

“Rey,” she says, like she, a total stranger, knows who Rey is. “I felt the call. Has anything happened? How do you feel?”

“I would like to wake up now,” Rey says decidedly. That’s how dreams work, right, once you know they’re dreams? She turns her head to take a last look at the big hot man that her subconscious summoned up to try and scare her or something. He’s gone. “I would really like to wake up now.”

The woman sighs, and gives a small chuckle. “I know. You must have a lot of questions. But – ” she points to the wooden shard in Rey’s hand “ – your instincts are clearly in good working order.” She shuts the car door and steps forward to take Rey’s hand. “Rey Jacobs. I’m Leah Organa, and I’m your Watcher. You have been called, and you are the Slayer.”

“I can hear the capital letters in that,” Rey says, dazed. Leah’s hand is warm. It shouldn’t feel so real. “I don’t think I like the capital letters.”

“What has happened to you tonight, Rey?” Leah asks gently.

“Well,” she says, counting with the fingers of her free hand against her thigh, trying to stay practical about the way this keeps feeling more and more like it’s not a dream, “I woke up feeling like I’d drunk a pot of third rail, I literally tore my apartment apart trying to work off some steam, I got attacked by a trust-funder with a fucked-up face and I stabbed him in the heart with a piece of my torn-up apartment and he turned to weird grey dust?” She gestures to the dust that lingers in the folds of her tee shirt. It’s the kind of detail reality has, that the dust is still there. That man, too – the second, dark one - his sad, unmonstrous face – somehow it’s the realest thing, realer than this woman and her practical hybrid coup, realer than Tito and Platt and the stink of the Gowanus, realer than her student loans or her phone bill or the few precious Likes on her latest tweeted link – 

“Ah, that was a vampire,” Leah says. “You’re the Vampire Slayer, you know,” and forget it – none of this is real. It is all much, much too silly.

* * *

“Well? Wasn’t I right?” Snoke asks him.

“Yes. You were right.”

“Hell has many mouths, Kylo Ren. The Slayers come to them, just as we do; they come like carrion birds to the watering hole.”

Kylo Ren is silent, because she was not a carrion bird – something come to clean the dead and carry mortal flesh into the sky, exchanged for the beating of wings. She was something crueler, something brighter.

“You’ve never met a Slayer before, have you?” Snoke asks shrewdly. “So many years of reading, studying. But you’ve never seen one with your own eyes.” He leans back in his chair. The apartment is dark, but neither of them needs light. Kylo can see his eyes as clear as day, sharp and knowing. “Never smelled one before either, eh boy?”

Kylo swallows. Like spice cookies warm from the oven. Like the strong dark tea to dip them in, like the honey to drizzle on top. Like sweat, fresh and female. Like blood, hot and mortal. His lips are wet when he parts them to answer. “No, Master.”

Snoke smiles, fangs gleaming. “You’ll taste her, my boy. She has a destiny. And so do you.”


	2. Supernaturally-Assigned Unpaid Internship

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This week on _In All the World:_** “The Slayer is able to meet vampires on their own ground. You’ve noticed that you’re very strong, I think. You’re also far faster and more resilient than a normal human.” 
> 
> There’s a general drift to this that Rey does not like. She doesn’t want to be resilient. She wants to not need to be resilient. She wants to go on with her life without having to bounce back from anything ever again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note the new tags. All major character deaths have occurred before the story begins. I feel the need to say explicitly: you should not need to have seen either _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ or _Angel_ for this story to make sense to you. I will explain the lore as I go along, and anyway for the purposes of this fic I've created an alternate timeline, which will get explained as the story continues.

Rey usually starts brainstorming as she climbs the short flight of stairs up from the R. But today the usual raw material she absorbs from her phone is scrambled and cross-wired. _Vampires: Six Ways You Can Protect Yourself and Your Family. Is the Term ‘Dark Powers’ Racist?_ She emerges into the chilly first sunlight. Which means she’s safe. _Vampire Slaying Is Gendered Labor._ Her messenger bag feels like it weighs nothing, and she has to keep checking to make sure the old computer is still in it. _Rey Jacobs Shouldn’t Be the Slayer, and Here’s Why._

That would be a long one.

* * *

“Vampires are essentially a parasitic species,” Leah says, peering over the wheel of her car. Rey never sees the city like this, from the passenger side of a car. Brooklyn shines on the other side of the river as they navigate the light traffic of FDR Drive at one in the morning. Leah’s cell phone is buzzing continually from its spot in the driver’s door, but she ignores it. “They feed on human blood, and they reproduce by possessing human bodies. The vampire you killed was a demon possessing the corpse of a man. The face you saw when he attacked? That’s the demon’s true face. The demon sustains the body and lends it inhuman strength and resilience. But it can’t exist independent of the human vessel.”

“Bodysnatching demons,” Rey says. It’s only September levels of cold out, and Leah has the heaters on, but her teeth are starting to chatter. “And it takes a stake through the heart to kill them.”

“A wooden stake. Or decapitation. Sunlight. Fire. Also explosions, or sufficiently thorough dismemberment, though we don’t recommend those.”

“We? Who’s ‘we?’”

“The Council of Watchers. We’re an ancient society, possibly the oldest on earth.” She glances ruefully down at her phone. “Both in terms of how long we’ve existed and in terms of median age of membership. Thousands of girls all over the world have the potential to become the Slayer. Each one of them is monitored – loosely – by a Watcher.”

“Which is how you knew my name?”

“Which is how I knew your name.” Leah takes the exit at 125th St. “If you hadn’t been called, you never would have known I was there. But since you were, it’s my job to equip you to do your job as well as you can. There is an immense amount of lore, written in numerous languages, which deals with the evils you have to fight. My job is to know it, and to train you to fight. And to arm you, which is why we’re going to my apartment. I didn’t have time to pack the car when I realized you’d been called.”

“What about crosses and garlic and holy water and silver bullets and shit?”

“Silver bullets are for werewolves.”

“Werewolves are real?”

“Yes, but rare and ethically complicated. Don’t worry about them for now. Vampires experience physical contact with garlic as intensely painful, and find the scent noxious.” Rey briefly wonders about her third foster mother, the one with nothing but salt in her spice rack. “Crosses and holy water can burn vampires, but the extent of the damage may be correlated to the faith held by the human being whose body the vampire is wearing. Which makes them unreliable in New York City.”

“I can’t fend them off with one of those ‘☪o✡eis✝’ bumper stickers? Should I get a cross necklace?”

“Only if you want to wear one,” Leah says. “Some slayers wear crucifixes as a sort of line of last defense, but a vampire who can get close enough to touch your neck is probably strong enough to endure a little burning. We regard it as a matter of personal preference.”

 _No dress code._ Rey tries not to giggle hysterically.

* * *

_No,_ Rey tells herself sternly. _No vampires. Fortnite. Keto diet. Hurricane Florence._ She has to think in search terms. _Adventure Time finale. Demi Lovato sober. Meghan Markle coat. Mac Miller Pete Davidson._

She keys in and the building hallway echoes with the sound of her shoes on the concrete. She tries to make her brain grind right, but it won’t. She should have stopped for coffee, but she can’t afford coffee until she’s fixed her fucking bathroom door. _Maybe wood glue and toothpaste for spackle and some paint? No. Fuck. It’s September. What are the searches? School’s already started; what are people searching for? Halloween costume early planning? Clever costume ideas. Baby Shark. Jonathan from Queer Eye. ‘Is this a pigeon?’ guy. Carly Rae Jepsen with a sword. Lady Gaga/Bradley Cooper couples costume. Vampire Slayer._ She laughs as she opens the door to the office.

“I hope you’re laughing because you’ve got a good idea for me,” Platt says.

Shit. Everyone else is already here, and Tito is somehow taking up more than half their table with his PowerBook and his vacuum flask. “Yes. It’s good. Scroll potential, good retention. It’s for early costume planning – ”

“Don’t tell me. Show me. And Rey?”

“Yes?”

“You’re not late. But I notice you _are_ the last person in today.”

Rey shifts her messenger bag. “I wasn’t yesterday.”

“You weren’t the first, either. Just noticing.”

* * *

Leah double-parks in front of a tower on 113th, in the black shadow of the Cathedral, and Rey follows her into the cozy, mirrored lobby, where a blonde security guard is watching the news on a little TV behind the desk. “Hi, Professor,” she says, as Rey and Leah cross in front of her desk.

“Rey,” Leah says, “I’m not sure that you and I and the weapons chest can all fit in the elevator. Wait here; I’ll be down in just a minute.”

Rey’s happy to oblige; she drops into one of the comfortable leather chairs and stares at the wall. There are a thousand things she wants to know but she really needs just thirty seconds to herself to breathe, and try to think straight.

Except she doesn’t even get that, because the moment the elevator doors close on Leah, a statuesque brunette strolls into the lobby, looking around with yellow eyes and worrying her lower lip with her fangs.

 _Another vampire?_ Rey thinks frantically, scrambling out of the chair as she stares at the creature’s distorted face. _Did it follow me here? Is it going to attack me?_ Rey looks helplessly down at the sliver of wood in her hand. Is she supposed to just shove it in, right in front of the guard?

“Can I help you?” the guard asks.

“Oh, yeah, thanks,” the vampire says cheerfully. “My sire said there’s a Watcher here? I’m here to see the Watcher.”

“You mean Prof. Organa? May I have a name, please?”

 _Can the guard not see its face?_ Rey wonders, trying to breathe evenly. _Is that like a superpower I have, that I can see the demon faces, and if I get her with the stake it’s just gonna look like I murdered a lady and the guard will call the cops on me?_

“Tri– oh no wait! Um. Can you write down Ebony? Ebony Dark’ness.” 

The guard fishes out the log book. “Ebony… sorry, what’s the last name again?”

“Dark’ness. With an apostrophe.”

“An apostrophe… where exactly?” the guard asks dubiously. The vampire isn’t reflected in the mirrors. Or in the windows. Rey’s head swivels back and forth between reflective surfaces, where the guard is dutifully taking dictation from empty air.

“Or no. That one’s probably taken, right? Cross that out. Wait, do you smell that?” The vampire’s head swivels left and right, its bony nose twitching. “Is that from Lush?”

Rey edges towards the door. Maybe if she runs, it’ll chase her. She read that once, about wolves or bears or something.

The vamp swings back towards the desk. “Oh wait! I have it. Ebony Skywa– ”

“Hey!” Rey says determinedly. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do, or what the fuck is going on, but she has to do something, right? “What do you want with the Watcher?”

“Oh,” the vampire shrugs, turning to her. “You know. I figured I’d start by breaking her neck, but – ”

There’s a pop and a hum and the vampire stares at Rey. For half a second she leans forward, looking baffled, before she dissolves into a cloud of dust. Leah is standing by the elevators, holding a crossbow. The guard coughs, waving the dust away.

“Sorry, Tessa,” Leah says casually. “Theater kids playing jokes again. Rey, can you help me take this trunk to the car?”

The trunk is made of wood and iron and is full of things that clank, and Rey, as it turns out, can hoist it up onto her shoulder with one arm. _I have made the sickest gains,_ she thinks, looking at her unaltered reflection in the lobby mirrors. As they’re going out, Leah stops and turns back to the guard, who has returned to watching the news, looking only mildly unnerved.

“Is there anything about LA? Eclipses, earthquakes, wildfires?”

“No,” the guard says. “Just Ukraine. Why? Did something happen?”

“I don’t know,” Leah says, and turns away with a troubled face.

* * *

“Have a fun night, Rey?” Tito asks. She ignores him. _It’s fine to cobble together a last-minute costume out from your closet and the Halloween store,_ she types, _but if you want to put in the kind of effort it takes for a really…_ Adjective. Fuck. She can’t think of an adjective. She deletes. _… if you want the kind of costume all your friends will want to Insta, you have to start planning NOW._

“I mean, we’ve all been there,” Tito continues. “Most of us stop after college, though.”

“What are you talking about?” Rey growls absently. _Here are some ideas for witty, on-trend, and eye-catching costumes!_ Does she need more intro than that? Or can she just pack all the keywords in the metadata?

“Like, you couldn’t make your walk of shame home before you came into the office?”

Rey raises her eyes from her screen. He’s smirking at her.

“What, did you think we just wouldn’t notice you’re wearing the same clothes?”

* * *

“Of course it’s better not to work in front of civilians,” Leah says. That they’re headed right back where they came adds to the surreality for Rey. Like the night might rewind itself and leave her where she began. “But if you have to, don’t waste your time trying to come up with a compelling explanation. Half the time they’ll make up their own without your help, and the other half they’ll seize on any bone you can throw them.”

“Like, ‘theater kids playing pranks?’”

“It’s worked before,” Leah shrugs.

“Okay, but if you can kill vampires yourself, what do you need me for?” Maybe it’s mostly a ceremonial position. Cutting the ribbon on wooden stake factories or something.

“I can kill a weak vampire who isn’t looking at me with the help of a very powerful and difficult-to-load weapon.”

“How did you know she was weak? She was like, six feet tall.”

Leah gestures, making fangs with two fingers. “The face. As vampires come into their powers, they learn to control the demonic face. It only comes out in moments of passion, fighting or feeding. Though after a few centuries, the human and the demonic face merge; they become one unchanging face. So a vampire who lets the demon show through outside a fight is other very young and weak, or very old and powerful. If she had been old, she wouldn’t have bothered with the guard.”

Rey is unnerved by how calm Leah is about all this. Like vampires are normal. Like being killed by a vampire is something that just might happen to a person. “And I’m supposed to be… better at killing the older ones?”

“The Slayer is able to meet vampires on their own ground. You’ve noticed that you’re very strong, I think. You’re also far faster and more resilient than a normal human.”

There’s a general drift to this that Rey does not like. She doesn’t want to be resilient. She wants to not need to be resilient. She wants to go on with her life without having to bounce back from anything ever again.

“So,” she says, trying to be delicate. “Being a Slayer. It’s a job.”

“Arguably the most important job in the world.”

That’s what all the interviewers say. “And… what’s the pay?” Leah, flipping on the turn signal, bites her lip. “Let me guess,” Rey says wearily. “Exposure.”

“I’m afraid it’s more of an ‘absolute secrecy’ sort of job, Rey.”

“But for no pay.”

“It’s not something we plan for, really. Most Slayers don’t require one. You are… a very unusual age for a Slayer. Most of the Council thought it was a mistake to even assign you a Watcher.” She touches her still-vibrating phone. “Seems they’re reconsidering.”

“What’s the usual age?”

“Every previous Slayer on record has been called between the ages of fourteen and sixteen.”

Hell. Rey feels the scrabbling sensation that’s been getting more and more familiar since she turned 23. _Too late. Missed the window. You should have been on this before now. The real go-getters start at twenty – eighteen – sixteen – fourteen –_ She pretends to be fascinated by the dark city outside the car. “So why do you want me, if I’m so old?”

“It’s not a question of wanting. You were called – selected by a mystical force older than recorded history. There isn’t exactly an application process.”

 _They don’t even want me._ “I’m sorry; I can’t do this. You seem really nice and it is _unquestionably_ badass to be suddenly able to fuck shit up and I totally value the importance of what you do, but... I can’t do it. It’s just not possible. I already live on caffeine and ramen and store-brand cereal and watered-down milk; I’m already on the six-to-six grind for five hundred a week; I _cannot_ take on an unpaid job fighting vampires. The mystical-force-older-than-whatever should’ve picked someone with a trust fund. Or parents. I can’t. I will literally die. So how do I get un-called?”

Leah sighs and turns to face her, face lit by the red stop light. “You literally die.”

_“What?”_

* * *

Rey’s head throbs. “Why are you paying so much attention to my fucking clothes, Tito?”

“Because that’s obviously why you wear them.”

His face is just mildly amused, in case the boss is watching, but his voice drips contempt. Rey can’t keep her own voice from trembling with rage. “I have never. In my life. Selected an outfit with _your attention_ in mind.”

“Oh, just Platt, then? I figured that’s how you got the job, but – ”

Rey shouldn’t do it. She can’t bear this but she can’t do it; she absolutely cannot do it.

But she does.

Her fist slams down on his laptop, his shiny last-year’s-model with its sleek metal case and clean black keys which is open on the table in front of him, and the plastic keys shatter and the aluminum shell bends around her blow and there are tiny glinting chips of something green and vital in her knuckles. She rubs her fist against her leggings, and feels it tingle, her scrapes already healing.

* * *

“The death of the previous Slayer is the call of the next.” Leah’s face is soft and serious. “There is no other way to pass it on. If you’ve been called, it means Faith Lehane has died.”

Rey leans back against the seat. The light turns green, but Leah doesn’t move the car. And Rey remembers the pale, tall man, and his low voice. _Remember what you’re made of._

“Demons and death,” she says faintly, and Leah’s eyes widen slightly.

“What?”

“After I killed that vampire. There was a man. He told me there was a demon inside me, that I was special, the only girl in all the world, and someone had to die for it to happen. Is there a demon inside me? Like the vampires?”

“The source of the Slayer’s power is unknown,” Leah says slowly. “There are some Watchers who theorize that it is essentially or originally demonic. It’s a somewhat… niche theory. Did the man tell you his name? What did he look like?”

“He was tall. Dark hair and a long face. Really pale. Like, _really_ pale. Was he a vampire, do you think?” Leah is still as a statue, vibrating with tension. “He didn’t try to attack me. He had this crazy scar, all down his face and his neck, like under his chin and everything, like a tattoo almost.”

Some of the tension leaves Leah; she frowns. “Oh. Possibly he was a member of a religious order interested in Slayers. You’ll find there are quite a few. I don’t remember any that go in for ritual scarring, but I can take another look. And he didn’t threaten you? He didn’t smell like a vampire?”

“How do vampires smell?”

Leah shrugs, and lets the car move again. “I couldn’t tell you. Only Slayers can smell them, but you may need to train your senses a little. We can start scheduling trainings regularly after sunset.”

“But I _can’t._ Not without pay. I’m telling you. Do you want me to do this job homeless? Is Human Services going to accept ‘supernaturally-assigned unpaid internship’ as a legitimate reason I can’t find work?”

The Watcher sighs. “Tomorrow night is Friday night. You don’t work Saturdays, do you? Let me think about it, talk to some people. I’ll see what I can do. Maybe we can work something out.”

 _Great,_ Rey thinks sourly. _That means $100 a month for a MetroCard._ She rides in silence, looking out the window.

“Slayers have tried to refuse the call before,” Leah says, as if she can see where Rey’s thoughts are trending. “It generally doesn’t last very long.”

“Mmm,” Rey says.

“Just because you don’t patrol, it doesn’t mean the vampires won’t see you as a threat. They’ll come looking for you, and you won’t have the training to fight them.”

“I don’t really have the training to live without an income, either.”

“The world needs you to do this. It’s not just individual lives at stake, Rey – ”

“If the world needs me to do it so bad, the world can fucking pay me!”

Leah’s quiet for a long time. “Take the weapons chest. Take my phone number. I’m free tomorrow night. And maybe we can figure something out.”

* * *

Tito stares at the bent and broken corpse of his computer. “Maybe Platt will reimburse you for it,” Rey says. “Since you’re such a good and well-qualified worker.”

He stands up, knocking his chair over. Everyone around them is taking earbuds out, turning to stare. “What did you _do?”_ Tito howls.

Rey makes a wide-eyed face. “I’ve never seen a hard drive crash like that! Like a literal crash? Must’ve been defective.” She spins away from him, gathering her own battered laptop up in her arms. “Platt!” she calls airily. “Platt, I’ve been considering my options.” Because who cares if it’s a nutty professor who wants her to fight vampires until she dies and can only _maybe_ pay her _something._ Maybe it’ll be worse than this, worse than doing worthless work for worthless pay, worse than telling herself the endless lie that at least she’s getting her name out there, worse than sitting in a cold room being humiliated and harassed and demeaned. Maybe it’ll be worse. “I quit. I fucking quit, effective now.”

She leaves, breakneck, not pausing for comment. She’ll invoice him for her pay; she probably won’t get it, but if she stays he’ll find a way to deny it to her anyway, and if has to listen to him tell her she’s too weak for the hustle, she’ll put something sharp through him, and he won’t conveniently dissolve into dust. In the hallway, she’s already pulling up Leah’s number with shaking fingers, and when the Watcher picks up, Rey bursts into the faint, beautiful Brooklyn sunshine and gasps, “Fine. I’ll do it. I’ll kill the vampires. But please. Please work something out. And _pay me.”_

* * *

Kylo Ren could go to the apartment Snoke gave him. The windows are securely blacked out with layers of paint. It’s fully-furnished. The bed is comfortable. And he needs sleep. But he can’t sleep there.

Instead he gets on one of the trains that never see the sun. He sits at the back of the car, where there’s only hard, unreflective plastic. He’s always found it easy to sleep on the subway, which rocks and hums and mumbles the familiar litany of stops. _Cortlandt Rector Whitehall South Ferry._

He dreams. The books he used to live for never mentioned that; no one ever told him that. He knows a lot of things now that he never used to imagine.

He dreams of a silver-haired man, his eyes gone black with magic. _What is lost, return._ It hurts, it hurts so much. The eyes are ordinary hazel. It hurts. 

_Show me your face._

_This is my face._

_No. Your real face. The face of my son._

He does what he had to do, but this time when he turns away, it isn’t Snoke who’s waiting for him. It’s the girl, and her eyes are wide with horror.

 _He loved you,_ she says.

 _I know,_ he says.

 _Union St,_ says the subway conductor, and Kylo bolts out of his seat, and there she is, through the window, boarding the Manhattan-bound train. She stares at him. The layers of glass between them don’t reflect his face, but she reaches up and traces the line of his scar on her own skin, and his hand rises to mirror hers. Then the trains pull on and out, drawing them apart. It hurts, it hurts so much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains two "cameos" from a little charity drive I participated in. (There will be more in forthcoming chapters, and this story needs a lot of extras, so I may repeat the call for another charity at a later date. If you'd like to keep an eye out for that, or if you like pictures of an adorable puppy, you can find me [on Twitter.](https://twitter.com/LinearAO3) I'm also sporadically [on Tumblr.](https://linearla.tumblr.com/)) Thank you very much to [Trixie](https://twitter.com/tourmalinemoon) and [Tessa,](https://twitter.com/Tessa3960) and thanks to the gracious [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/Bombastique1)) for reading it over!


	3. Training Montage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This week on _In All the World:_** Giles takes off his glasses and lays his arm briefly across his eyes. “And I’m sorry to tell you that there is a very difficult task likely to confront you very soon. Faith killed the Starkiller demon. An astonishing feat. But the First Order survived. And they’ve come to New York.” 
> 
> Leah draws a heavy breath. “I was afraid that might be true.”
> 
> He looks over at her regretfully. “Leah… I’m very sorry. Not only is Snoke here… I’m afraid he’s brought Kylo Ren with him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should have done this before, but if you haven't seen any Buffy before, here are some vampire human/demon face pairs: a vampire's [human face](https://www.pophorror.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Drusilla.png) and her [demon face](http://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/buffy-the-vampire-slayer/thumb/a/a4/Drusillavamped.jpg/228px-Drusillavamped.jpg); another vampire's [human face](https://media.toofab.com/2017/11/27/james-marsters-buffy-inset-810x610.jpg) and [demon face,](https://jonathanbudden.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/spike-2.jpg) and one vampire, like Snoke, who is too old to have more than [one face.](https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/enhanced/webdr06/2013/6/7/15/enhanced-buzz-21134-1370632344-17.jpg?downsize=600:*&output-format=auto&output-quality=auto)

“Kevin, you’re on speaker.”

“Oh,” says a British voice from Leah’s phone, “that means I should hang up, yes?”

 _“No,”_ Leah says loudly. “It means _my phone_ is on speaker. I can’t control _your_ – never mind. It means the Slayer and I can both hear you.”

“Ah,” the voice says, a little louder but clearly uncertain. “I think I see. Miss Jacobs? Hello? Are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here.” Leah’s apartment isn’t actually a penthouse, but it feels like one to Rey. The door opens onto undivided space with white walls and a white coffered ceiling; the varnished dining room table they’re sitting at could seat twelve, there’re two soft-looking couches which bracket a spacious living area, a grand piano with its lid shut, and it’s all surrounded by floor-to-ceiling shelves of enormous books with cracking leather spines and floor-to-ceiling windows through which she can see the scaffolding and stained glass of St. John’s Cathedral. It could be in a magazine if it weren’t so messy. 

Probably the editorial director would want to take out the battle axe embedded in the ceiling, too.

“An honor to speak with you, Miss Jacobs. Leah, you didn’t tell me she was British.”

“I’m not, actually. Not technically.” _You know, if you tried harder, you could sound American,_ the first foster father said. _I don’t want to sound like you. You’re not my father._ “My parents are.”

“Ah,” the Watcher on the phone says, as if he sees, though Rey is fairly sure he doesn’t. “Well, still an honor. To be honest, though, I’m afraid I’m not quite sure why you’re calling; I don’t know that I can tell you anything that Mr. Giles can’t tell you more thoroughly, and he should be there – ”

“His plane was cancelled; he’s waiting for the next flight out of LAX,” Leah says. “He texted me.”

“Texted! Really? Good for him. He’s always been advanced. But he should be able to answer any – ”

“Well, for one thing, why is it Rupert who’s coming? Why not Wesley Wyndam-Pryce; did he not… ”

There’s an awkward silence. “Ah. You didn’t hear? No. In the line of duty, I’m afraid. Beside his Slayer.”

Leah swallows. “I see. May he rest in peace.”

“Indeed. But I’m sure Mr. Giles can give you a more thorough – ”

“Yes, of course. Kevin, the other thing I wanted to talk to you about was funding.”

“Funding?”

“Yes. Rey, as you’re probably aware, is an unusual age for a Slayer. She doesn’t have parental support. Her duties as a Slayer make it difficult for her to hold down a full-time job. I thought it might be possible to allocate a Watcher’s salary to her.”

“Well – but surely that’s a question for Roger? He is the treasurer.”

“Roger said it was a question for you.” Rey has given the same spiel to four different elderly British men, about how she’s _so_ thrifty and prudent and _so_ good at budgeting and how New York rent is _so_ expensive. It’s all 100% true, but that doesn’t make it less tiring to repeat. She’s been interested to note that none of them have suggested she leave New York, even though Leah seems quite concerned about LA.

“Listen,” the man on the phone says, “I don’t see why you shouldn’t try to go straight to the top. Ring up Quentin; surely he can take care of it.”

“Right, yes,” Leah sighs. “Thanks, Kevin.”

“Enjoy your tea,” Rey says, taking a wild stab at the time difference. Leah gives her a wry look.

Rey settles in for the next phone call, the next British man, but it doesn’t happen; Leah puts her phone away. “We should probably start training.”

That’s fine with Rey. After all these phone calls, she’s dying to hit something.

… 

“Nexis accepts Boolean search terms, so try ‘bite OR puncture OR throat wound,’” Leah says. “Remember to limit the search period using the drop-down menu in the corner. We’re looking for violent deaths in the past 24 hours.”

Rey rubs her eyes and complies. “Okay. That’s like...” The search results load. “Twelve hits in the tri-state area.”

“Probably only four or so actually resulted in death. Look through to find the fatalities. Vampires select for youth, strength, and beauty when they choose who they’re going to sire.”

Rey clicks, scanning boilerplate crime prose and looking for photographs. “’Sire’ means when they make another vampire?”

“Yes. The vampire gives the victim the vampire’s own blood to drink before killing them with exsanguination. Drinking all their blood.” 

“Got it.” Most of the people in the news seem to have survived. Rey is relieved, though she hates to think of their medical bills. (That’s the other thing she’d had to keep explaining to the Watchers – in America you have to pay for your healthcare. Like, all of it.) “So when the vampire in the lobby mentioned her sire, that meant the vampire that made her a vampire?”

“Yes. It’s often a close relationship, a sort of demonic family. If we do find a likely candidate, we have to be on the lookout; there are even odds the sire may be lurking around the gravesite.”

“What about this guy?” Rey points to the photo. “Steven Santos. He’s the only one who’s actually dead, and he’s young. ‘Gruesome throat wound,’ it says.”

Leah looks over her shoulder. “Oh, that’s a vampire victim, absolutely. And not an unlikely siring prospect. Now we have ten hours to find out where he’s buried. And get you some stakes.”

* * *

Kylo checks his phone. The problem with sleeping on the subway is that you’re basically fucking stuck down there until the sun sets, but whatever; it’s better than the sewers, and anyway it’s getting to be winter.

He gets off at 34th St-Herald Square. The warmest station in the system. Every bench has one or more of the ones who never get on any train. The ones nobody misses. He’d have to lure them away; when you bite down the blood spurts and then people call cops, form mobs. But it wouldn’t be hard. And even before he was hungry it’s not like he was ever kind; at best he ignored them. It’s bad for people, to be ignored. It makes them sick.

He used to think they smelled bad. He looks at a man, bald and scabby, some age between forty and sixty. He smells delicious. Warm. Kylo can feel his teeth sharpening, the other face stirring beneath his skin.

He gets on a Brooklyn-bound R. Hunting’s better at night, anyway. And Snoke will want him there soon.

* * *

“So vampires are just, like, a demon wearing a human suit?” Rey asks, throwing the stake into the air and catching it. Her night vision is better now. She hadn’t noticed under the streetlights, but in the unlit cemetery, this far from the Broadway lights, it’s obvious. “Like, baby demons that want to eat people? Is that why the lobby vampire didn’t seem to know her own name?”

Leah looks down at her crossbow. She seems unhappy, but Rey supposes she’d be unhappy too, if vampires were coming around to her nice doorman building to murder her. “Vampires… retain memories of the human lives of their bodies. But they’re not that person. And they often want to distance themselves by assuming a new name. The vampire who had been Heinrich Joseph Nest as human called himself ‘the Master,’ and the vampire who took the body of William Pratt called himself ‘William the Bloody’ and later, ‘Spike,’ to take two examples from a famous line.”

“So they do all really like the pretentious goth thing?”

Leah snorts. “Some of them choose ordinary names, of course, or keep the human’s name, but yes, you’re right; many of them like something they think sounds impressive. They can be very interested in status, vampires. Very invested in hierarchy.”

The moon is quite visible and there’s no movement from the fresh grave. Rey gestures at the dirt heaped up in front of Steven Santos’s headstone. “So they just break through the box and dig themselves up?”

“Usually, yes. Unless they’re too weak.”

“What happens then?”

“Usually their sires just leave them.”

“Do they starve to death? Suffocate?”

“No,” Leah says. “The demon is immortal. It can’t die; it can only be killed.”

Rey is appalled. “They’re just _trapped forever?”_

“I’m told the hunger usually induces hallucinations.” Leah’s night vision may not be as good as Rey’s, but her outline is probably visible in the ambient light of Broadway and the moon, and her body language must convey her horror. “If you had more experience of vampires, Rey – you might feel less sympathy.”

“I mean, one tried to eat me, but – ”

“But you survived. Many people I have loved haven’t.”

Her voice is flat, in the way your voice only gets when you’re so used to being sad about something that you forget how sadness is even supposed to sound. Rey’s quiet after that.

* * *

Snoke’s apartment is in the same building as his. He’s got it all decked out in red, the dark kind that makes human hearts beat faster and makes vampires hungry. Kylo knocks, and a guard lets him in. Snoke usually has a few guards. Maybe they like their demon faces better, or maybe they want to look like Snoke, or maybe they’re just too weak to do otherwise. Kylo doesn’t care.

“My boy,” Snoke says, and gestures him over. He’s got the map spread out in front of him, and he points to a spot on the east edge of Sunset Park. “What do you think?”

It’s near Green-Wood, which is definitely a point in its favor. But – “There’s a nest of Croyen demons on the south side of the cemetery,” he says. “They won’t interfere, but they’re known to fuck with compasses and cell phones, and I don’t know what that’ll do to your calculations.”

Snoke sighs. “Kylo. I knew I made the right choice, bringing you here. You’re invaluable, aren’t you?”

He feels so elated with pride and sick with shame that he can’t answer, but it’s a rhetorical question. Snoke turns to one of his guards. “Get me the agent.”

* * *

Leah’s phone glows as she consults it. She tips her head up, searching for moon. “If he were going to rise again, he would have by now. I’m afraid he’s probably just… dead.”

“Sorry, Steve,” Rey says consolingly. _“I_ thought you were handsome.”

Which is of course when she gets hit from behind and goes face down in the same pile of fresh dirt she’s been fruitlessly staring at for an hour.

The weight on her back is heavy, and cold. It’s pressing her head down into the dirt, so that she can’t breathe. She tries to push herself back, and throw her assailant, but her hands just sink down. She can hear it shifting and hissing above her, hear Leah running among the graves. Afterwards, Rey realizes that she was looking for a clear shot, but as it happens, it sounds like she’s being left alone. And so she does what she did the last time she was abandoned: she claws, furiously, at everything she can reach, scrambling and scrabbling, and her fingers catch in long tangled hair and she _yanks_ and the vampire on her back screeches and fights, and Rey yanks harder, close to the scalp and down, and it’s off her. She jumps to her feet and snatches up her stake.

The vampire is a blonde, just over five feet high if Rey had to guess, and yeah, she’d probably count as hot if it weren’t for the whole yellow-eyes-ridged-brow-gross-fangs situation she currently has going on. She hisses, crouching to spring, and Rey lunges for her. The vampire blocks and punches out; Rey catches her arm and pulls her close.

“What are you doing?” it hisses.

“Trying to smell you,” Rey grits. She guesses she can smell it? There’s a lot of dirt in her nose, but she thinks she can smell the vampire anyway. There’s a _dark_ smell to her, a cold smell. A bit like a thunderstorm, Rey decides, and throws herself forward, her stake braced against her own chest. The vampire’s dust melts into the damp cemetery grass.

“Well,” Leah says behind her, and she sounds dry, but also a little impressed. “That was clever.” Rey can’t help it; she’s facing away from Leah, and she tries to smother smile, but it spreads over her face. Her chest feels warm.

“Thank you,” she says, trying not to sound too pleased. _You can’t let them see what a thirsty bitch you are,_ she reminds herself. _Just because nobody’s ever called you anything but barely adequate since –_

“Now, are you ready for the next one?”

Rey puts her hands over her face. “God. The training montage is just starting, isn’t it?”

* * *

“I thought I was the _Vampire_ Slayer,” Rey says in an irritable whisper. The sewers smell terrible, and she resents the look the teens on the sidewalk gave her when she followed Leah down into the manhole. “You’re telling me I’m responsible for these things too?”

“I’m afraid so,” Leah says calmly. Below them, a creature which is roughly human-shaped, as far as Rey can tell through the thick layer of slime, is humming to itself. Well, human-with-antlers-shaped. “It’s your duty to protect the human world from supernatural harm.”

The human-with-antlers-and-slime-shaped creature breaks into off-key song. _“Turkey,”_ it sings, _“turkey in the stawwww, turkey in the strawwww, turkey in the stawww-aww-aww..”_

Rey blinks. “That’s the tune to… ‘Needle in the Hay?’” Leah just shrugs. “And I have to… behead it? It doesn’t seem to be hurting anyone.”

“I know,” Leah says, “but if you don’t, it will drown Mott Haven in slime. They produce it at an exponentially increasing rate.”

“Fine,” Rey says. “Gimme the sword.”

* * *

The bodega lights flicker, and Leah chants something in Latin. Something that seems to be pure shadow falls into the aisle out of nowhere, knocking Goya beans all over the floor. It makes a nasty sound like a boot coming out of mud, and launches itself straight for the face of the man behind the counter. He shrieks, face obscured in darkness. Leah seizes the nazar charm hanging by the register and presses it into the shadow; it makes a nastier sound, like a boot stomping on a leech, and lets the man go.

Leah says something else in Latin while the poor man curses in Arabic and Rey stares down at the creature in silent amazement as it solidifies, takes on depth and weight and a certain slimy texture that Rey finds unsurprising but unpleasant.

“Now?” she asks. Leah nods, and Rey slices downwards. The thing sprays purple-blue blood everywhere.

 _“Fuck,”_ the man behind the counter says. “I have to mop that shit up?”

“Complain to your utility company,” Leah says. “They’re the ones who installed circuit breakers with the Curse of Loman on them.”

“Fuck,” the man says again, more glumly. “I can never get through their fucking phone tree.”

* * *

“Come back here!” Rey hollers, but the vampire seems uninterested in listening to a dirty, slime-streaked, blue-stained woman with bared teeth and a katana; he drops the college kid he’d been about to chomp on, leaps through the sad shrubbery of Washington Square Park and takes off running down W. 4th, so Rey takes off after him. 

He’s very, very fast, but as it turns out so is Rey, now, and it feels amazing. She makes a running leap the vaults her over the hood of a taxi, and she feels like she’s flying, like her body has suddenly discovered the One Amazing Tip it needed to learn how to be in the world the way it was always supposed to, swift and fierce and unstoppable.

She corners the vamp under the IFC Center marquee. She takes his head off with one clean blow like halving an apple, and he crumbles into dust. She sighs with satisfaction, that faint stormy smell lingering in her nose, and then she hears an outraged sound. _Shit._ She just straight-up beheaded a dude on Sixth Ave. She turns, sword still gripped in two hands. They’re completely normal New Yorkers, the pair looking at her, just out of a midnight showing, an older Indian woman and a younger man who might be her son, and the woman’s not even looking at Rey.

“You said it was just a normal cookie!” she scolds. “I told you I didn’t want to do any drugs!”

“It was a normal cookie, Amma,” he protests, staring blankly at the sifting of dust where the vampire used to be. He blinks at Rey, and Rey blinks back. “I got it from concessions.”

“Then I’m complaining to concessions,”she says, turning back into the theater. “Jodorowsky is enough trip for one night, thank you very much.”

Leah’s hybrid pulls up at the curb, and Rey jumps into the back as if it were her Uber. “Right,” she gasped. “Where to now?”

In the rearview mirror, Leah cocks an eyebrow. “Your apartment, I would think.”

Rey snorts. “It’s only 2AM! I can get, like, five more vampires in, right? Let’s find another! Thank u next!”

But the car is heading south. “You’ve addressed a slime demon, a Loman demon, and two vampires. You’re high on adrenaline now, and I’m sure you _could_ hunt another five vampires tonight. You’re admirably dedicated. But it’s your first night on patrol. And I’m going to need you before sunset tomorrow, so I recommend a good long sleep. And a good long shower; you smell atrocious.”

* * *

The agent in a thin man, and he’s almost as pale as Kylo himself, but the flush on his cheeks would give him away even if his smell didn’t. He’s alive; alive and frightened. Kylo licks his lips, and Snoke smiles at him.

“This is Kylo Ren,” he tells the agent. “My right hand, but be careful; it seems he hasn’t eaten tonight.”

The man blanches and Kylo scowls. “I’m a picky eater,” he says, turning his face away, and Snoke laughs.

“Still,” Snoke says, gesturing at a dark-haired guard, “Sarah hasn’t eaten since Wednesday. I doubt she’s feeling very picky.” Sarah smiles. Her canines are about an inch long, indenting her lower lip. “So do try to demonstrate a value which outweighs your appeal as dinner, Mr. Hux.”

* * *

Rey is sore when she wakes up. And yesterday’s clothes are pretty fucked. But she’s remembering little things – the college kid, falling unharmed into the bushes of Washington Square, and the way all the lights in the bodega got a little brighter when the demon died. Leah, telling her she was clever and dedicated. _“Admirably_ dedicated,” she reminds the mirror, and turns away before she can catch herself smiling again.

And God, it’s r/oddlysatisfying to watch them poof into dust like that.

She texts Leah.

> Me: What time you want me?

> Professor Watcher Lady: By 5 if you can, please.

It’s 3 now. She checks the MTA, and of course the Manhattan trains are fucked, because it’s a fucking weekend. She drags on some pants and her CUNY sweatshirt and heads out.

But she lucks out on the trains somehow; by the time she makes it to Morningside Heights, she’s only wiser by one episode of RadioLab, not the two she downloaded on the way to the train. There’s a different guard at the desk, and Rey wonders, as she rides the elevator up, if this one’s seen a lot of people explode into dust in front of him.

She doesn’t think Leah will be mad that she’s early; the text sounded like the earlier the better, and it’s all part of being _admirably dedicated,_ right? Totally worthy of a salary. Maybe 40k. A girl can dream. 

A girl has heightened hearing, though, if she’s the Slayer, and as she raises her hand to the bell, she hears the voice from inside the apartment, soft and male and British.

“...must say I’m thankful that Rey is as old as she is; I don’t think I could come here and look a fifteen-year-old in the eyes. How we look any of them in the eyes I’ll never know.”

“We fight beside them,” Leah answers. “Sometimes die for them.”

“Not as often as they die for us. I know someone has to do the reading, cast the spells, decipher the ancient Sumerian prophecies, all that… but it doesn’t change the facts, Leah. They are children, and we send them out to face demons.”

“If we don’t, Rupert…”

“I know. The demons will come for us all. I’m just… I’m tired of it, Leah. I can’t pretend to know how you felt when Ben was… but, now that Buffy…” His voice strains. “Will you think it presumptuous to say I think I know something now of what it is to lose a child?”

 _Buffy?_ Rey thinks. _I thought the last Slayer was named Faith?_

Leah’s voice is strained, too, but she’s gentle. “No. I know. You loved her. You kept her alive longer than any Slayer in history.”

“It doesn’t… looking back, all I can think is that I should have done better. Should have done more.”

“You did what we all have to do for the Slayer. We have to make them as strong as we can. You did it for Buffy. And I’ll try to do it for Rey.”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose you’re right.” He sighs, and Rey raises her hand to the bell again. “I don’t envy Rey, of course. Following in the steps of the two longest-serving Slayers the world has ever known.”

Rey drops her hand again.

“Apparently,” Leah says, “the prevailing theory on the Council is that the length of their service is the reason Rey was called when she was so old.”

“Ah, yes. The average term of service for a Slayer being approximately a year, say, fifteen to sixteen, and so the call reverts to the norm? But Buffy and Faith serving for more than twenty years, the – ”

He says more after that but Rey doesn’t hear it. _The average term of service is a year._

She wants to turn and run. She quit one job yesterday; why can’t she quit another today? A year? It’s one thing to tweet about wanting to die; it’s something else to imagine that she won’t live to see the end of the presidential term. _And what if I don’t find my parents; that means I only have a year to find my parents. I have to hurry._ Hurry to what? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what to do at all.

“Rey has a great deal of raw power, even untrained,” Leah says. “It may be a function of her age, or she may just happen to be specially gifted.” _Gifted,_ Rey thinks; she’s never been _gifted_ before. But she’s not going to risk death just because a nice lady told her she was smart and good at it; this is ridiculous. “But things like this don’t happen for no reason. What’s coming to New York, Giles? What needs such a powerful Slayer to fight it?”

Except she doesn’t really have a choice, does she? She remembers the college kid, eyes wide and terrified, and the bodega owner struggling under the black shadow. She can’t just leave them to die because she’s afraid.

She rings the bell.

Her heart’s going like mad. She’ll just have to be better, she thinks helplessly as she hears Leah walking to the door. If the last two Slayers were so exceptional, she’ll just have to be exceptional too, better than they were, even, like the latest laptop that has twice as much storage as the generation before, just be better, live longer, fight the demons, find her parents; she can do it; she just has to try hard; she just has to hustle –

“Rey,” Leah says, and Rey kind of hates how she melts at the warmth in her voice.

“Hey,” she says, trying to sound normal and not like a person who just overheard that their life expectancy is twelve months. “I, uh, I know I’m early; I can go wait in the lobby if you want – ”

“No, no, come in! Would you like tea? Rey, this is Mr. Rupert Giles. He was the watcher to the Slayer before Faith, Buffy Summers.”

The man on the couch rises and comes to meet her. He’s silver-haired and thin, but thin the way old people are thin; in his square face and solid neck she thinks she can glimpse a powerfully-built man, handsome in the noble-faced way Rottweilers are handsome. “Please feel free to call me Rupert. Or Giles, that’s what… my own Slayer used to call me. An honor to meet you, Rey.”

Rey shakes his hand; his grip is strong, and though he looks tired and sad behind his wire-frame glasses, he still manages a beaming smile. The tea on the side table next to him is barely touched and still steaming. He must not have been here long.

“Do you take milk in your tea, Rey?” Leah calls from the open-plan kitchen with its granite countertops. “Lemon? Sugar? Oh, never mind, I’ll just bring them all over.”

Giles reseats himself on the couch, and Rey wants to grill him. _What did Buffy and Faith do? How did they stay alive? What kind of training do I need? Is there reading I should do? A diet I should follow? A workout regimen?_ But when he looks down at his tea his face is so full of grief she can’t even think of starting.

“Do you remember the Sunnydale fires, in California?” Leah sets a mug of tea beside Rey, and then a little plate with a lemon slice and a stack of sugar cubes, and then a measuring cup with milk in it, and then a little jar of honey with a dipper, and then another plate, stacked with small white rounded cookies.

“Yeah, it was like, enormous right? Like, 100,000 acres? And it took them like a month to put it out.”

“210,000 acres, actually,” Giles says. “And it’s not out yet.”

“What? But wasn’t that in – like I know time has no meaning anymore but – ”

Giles looks mildly bemused, but Leah nods, leaning against a bookshelf. “No, you’re right; it did start last year.” 

“And you’re right that it took them a month to contain it,” Giles explains, “but it will probably burn for some time to come.”

“Sunnydale was the site of a Hellmouth – a portal of evil energy connecting our world to the dimension that demons come from. Buffy Summers was stationed at the Hellmouth. Even closed, as it mostly was, a Hellmouth is powerfully attractive to vampires and other creatures of darkness. It exudes magic energy which strengthens them.”

“Buffy wanted to close the Hellmouth permanently,” Giles says, looking down into his mug. “She succeeded, but.. ” His voice trails away until Rey can barely hear him. “At the cost of her own life. Her body was recovered on the first day of the fire.”

Leah looks at him with terrible sympathy in her face. Giles pretends to sip his tea, blinking away the wetness in his eyes.

“Buffy believed,” he continues, “that closing the Hellmouth would diminish the power of evil in this world. And she was right. But unfortunately, the creatures who had been drawn to the Hellmouth seem to, ah, miss it. A group of vampires who refer to themselves as the First Order summoned an ancient demon in Los Angeles this week, with the goal of opening a new Hellmouth. The Slayer, Faith Lehane, managed to defeat the demon, but she, too, lost her life.”

“Which is why I’m the Slayer now.”

“Yes.” Giles takes off his glasses and lays his arm briefly across his eyes. “And I’m sorry to tell you that there is a very difficult task likely to confront you very soon. Faith killed the Starkiller demon. An astonishing feat. But the First Order survived. And they’ve come to New York.”

Leah draws a heavy breath. “I was afraid that might be true.”

He looks over at her regretfully. “Leah… I’m very sorry. Not only is Snoke here… I’m afraid he’s brought Kylo Ren with him.”

Leah sets her tea on the bookshelf with a shaking hand, and presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, as if her head hurt unbearably. Rey looks between the two Watchers.

“Snoke? Kylo Ren? Are those people? Or weapons?”

“They’re vampires,” Giles says. His voice is gentle and his eyes are fixed on Leah. “Snoke is the leader of the First Order, a very old and very powerful vampire from the line of the Vampire Emperor. Kylo Ren is… ”

“Watchers are trained never to allow themselves to be sired,” Leah says harshly, dropping her hands. Her eyes are hard. “They know too much, things vampires should never know. A Watcher has to be prepared to die rather than turn. Kylo Ren is a vampire in the body of a watcher who failed.”

“Leah… ” Giles says. Now he’s the one looking at her with sympathy and pity.

“He’s extremely dangerous, to you in particular. It’s likely he knows where you live. Be exceedingly careful when you go home and leave, and do not invite anyone into your home, under any circumstances, do you understand?”

Her tone is so stern that all Rey can do is nod and swallow. Shit. So much for being the latest in Slayer tech. She’ll be lucky if she makes it through the year.

* * *

“That edge of Borough Park isn’t zoned for construction above five floors,” the agent is saying. Snoke called him an agent, anyway; Kylo thinks he seems like a bigger fish. 

“I don’t need more than five floors,” Snoke smiles, and Hux looks dubious, like nobody would bother with merely five floors. He’s clearly up to the elbows in Brooklyn real estate, which is big business these days. He remembers when Dumbo was warehouses. But then, he supposes, some members of the First Order remember when all of Brooklyn was rolling green hills.

 _I too lived; Brooklyn of the ample hills was mine._ They put that on the ice cream cartons. He used to eat ice cream. He remembers bourbon ice cream, lemon ice cream, ice cream with espresso and sharp little chunks of chocolate. The Slayer can still eat ice cream. He imagines her with a cone, scraping sweet cream with her tongue.

“The Slayer hasn’t established her territory yet,” Snoke says, like he can hear Kylo’s thoughts. Kylo’s afraid he can sometimes.

“Slayers rarely do that officially anymore,” he says. “The last time there was a Slayer in New York City was in the 70s; she covered everywhere the subway went. The new Slayer has an expanded subway and a Watcher with a car. It’s fair to say she’ll try to cover at least four boroughs.” He shifts restlessly. He doesn’t want to be here; Hux smells like he’ll taste bitter, but he’s still alive, full of warm, salty blood, and the walls make Kylo hungrier. “I should be watching her.”

“You’re eager.” Snoke sounds indulgent, but Kylo knows better.

“I’m sorry, Master.” He lowers his head, concentrating on his shoes until the mortal’s gone. The brown-haired guard shuts the door on him.

“You really want to sire that guy, Master Snoke? He’s handsome but he’s… ” She wrinkles her nose as much as someone whose nose is already a collection of bony ridges can.

Snoke shrugs. “It was his price. Everyone has their price.” His head turns. “Or their breaking point. Don’t they, Kylo Ren?”

The anger is like nausea; it rises from his stomach to his throat and twists his face, the demon emerging with a roar, and the next thing he does is reflex: his fist goes into the deep red wall, cracking through paint and plaster. His fist closes around the stud, but before he can rip it free, Snoke has him on the ground, the old vampire’s foot on his throat. Kylo goes limp, letting his face fall back into its human shape.

“Quite a lot of breaking points, in some cases,” Snoke says musingly, and Kylo turns his face away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next time on _In All the World:_**  
>  "Unfortunately, I wasn't present for the destruction of the Starkiller demon. But I believe a friend of yours was, and he's on his way here by car - Edgar De Marino?"
> 
> "Poe's coming back?" Leah says, frowning. "Why didn't he fly?"
> 
> "He said, he had, ah, multiple reasons. I think you'll want to speak to his passengers."
> 
> * * *
> 
> Sorry this chapter is late! The IFC Center is an independent movie theater which regularly screens Jodorowsky's _The Holy Mountain_ at midnight. Ample Hills is a Brooklyn ice creamery which takes its name from the line of Walt Whitman poetry Ben remembers seeing on their cartons. Cameos this week by [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique), [Taxila](taxila), and [Weddersins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Weddersins/pseuds/Weddersins), with two additional cameos by the request of [Cerinthe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerinthe/pseuds/cerinthe) and [VillainousChild.](https://twitter.com/villainouschild) If you have any questions you don't feel like posing in the comments, you can find me [on Twitter.](https://twitter.com/LinearAO3) I'm also sporadically [on Tumblr.](https://linearla.tumblr.com/)


	4. Mr. Mysterious Scar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This week on _In All the World:_** “Hello, Slayer,” says a low voice, and look, it’s Mr. Mysterious Scar. Stepping out of the shadows cast by a 24-hour market fluorescents, with his dark eyes fixed on her. 
> 
> “So are you a vampire or are you in a creepy cult?” she asks, because she has murder-high levels of adrenaline in her bloodstream and she’s not in the mood to fuck around. His steady look doesn’t waver, but he doesn’t answer. Rey does not have time for coy. She inhales deeply, nostrils flaring, and his eyes widen as she catches that thunderstorm smell. Vampire it is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've updated the tags as best I can, but I don't have everything entirely nailed down, so some things might still change. If you are sensitive to violence against animals, you may want to skip the paragraph that begins "He heads for the subway."
> 
> Also, if you have only seen _Buffy_ and never _Angel,_ there is a past pairing in this chapter that is going to seem like complete crack to you, but please roll with it. If you haven't seen either, you probably don't care, but I thank you for reading anyway!

Leah doesn’t seem to want to talk any more about Snoke or Kylo Ren, and Rey is a little unnerved, because if there’s more to know she’d like to know it. But she can’t be too mad when the subject Leah picks instead is getting Rey paid. Because she doesn’t want to get offed by a vampire with her home address, but she does need enough money to pay rent to _have_ a home address.

“The general consensus, or as close as a bunch of Watchers can get to one, is that we need to take it to Quentin Travers. But I’m worried Travers is just going to dig in on grounds of ‘tradition’ or tarnishing the Slayer’s sacred duty or something. How do we make him see sense?”

“I’m not at all sure that I can help with Travers; he’s always hated me. But I may be able to help in the general effort.” He reaches for a battered brown attache case that’s been halfway kicked under his sofa. “I happen to be carrying all of Wesley Wyndam-Pryce’s papers back to England, including his pension forms. With a little work, they can easily designate as a beneficiary, oh, I don’t know, ‘the Slayer, whoever she may be?’”

Rey gawps. “You can’t _forge his forms_ for me.”

Giles shrugs, as if it’s just a bit of standard tedious pencil-pushing, like a FAFSA. “The paperwork as it currently stands designates, and I quote, ‘anyone but my father.’ You aren’t Roger Wyndam-Pryce, so your benefit is in line with Wesley’s wishes.”

He sounds so fucking _reasonable._ “What if you get caught?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I was in the Council’s bad books.” 

Rey feels lost. He’s willing to get in trouble for _her._ It’s not like she’s never seen a rule bent or a regulation fudged in someone’s favor. Even hers, sometimes – once when she went to John’s on Bleeker St. she thought she had a dollar in change but it was only eighty-five cents, and the guy at the counter let her have a cheese slice anyway. But Giles is offering to bend a real rule – he’s offering to _risk_ something for her.

“You’d do that?”

“I assure you, it’s a moment’s work,” he says, and opens the case. “I agree, of course, that you ought to be able to eat. Though I’m afraid Wesley’s pension may not be very large.”

Leah frowns. “I got a thousand a month from my parents’ pensions.”

“I doubt the council’s adjusted much for inflation since the 70s. But he did die in the line of duty, so it ought to be something.”

It’s not actually a moment’s work; it actually takes him and Leah about half an hour to make the forgery convincing. Rey just watches, dazed. When Giles puts the paperwork back in his case, she says, “It’s weird… I think I had a dream about a guy named Wesley the other night.”

Both Watchers turn to her, eyebrows raised. “What did you dream?” Leah asks.

“Oh, not that he’d give me money or anything. I just thought it was a funny coincidence.”

“Slayers are known to have, ah, prophetic dreams,” Giles says. “Anything you can remember of your dream may be valuable information.”

“Does this mean I have to keep a dream journal?” Rey is appalled. Sleep has always been the one place she’s safe, the one place she doesn’t have to work. And now her sleep is a job responsibility too?

“It probably wouldn’t hurt,” Leah says. “What did you dream?”

Rey takes a deep breath and closes her eyes, trying to remember. “He was a sort of thin guy, I guess? With dark hair and blue eyes and stubble. I think maybe he was going grey. And he and I were walking down the street. He had a gun in each hand, and he was talking about ‘vital points.’ There were things I had to hit, I think? Like targets. He kept telling me. I told him to shut up. And he said, ‘Make me.’ And I pushed him into a wall and kissed him.” She opens her eyes. “Is this weird?”

Giles is cleaning his glasses like his life depends on it, and Leah seems to be smothering a smile. “No, no. Go on, Rey.”

Rey closes her eyes again. “And he said – he said he’d take care of me. He said something about having a sacred duty and he was kind of joking but kind of not, I think? And I said if the world ended nobody’d hold it against him and then he said something cringey about me holding things against him. And then – then I pushed him down because the demon was there. And I tried to hit all the targets in the order Wes told me to, but after the first one the fuckin’ axe wouldn’t go in more than like an inch or two.” 

She’s vaguely aware that her voice sounds funny, but she’s doing better at remembering the dream so she doesn’t want to stop and think about it, or about whatever name Giles just called; she just goes on. Sinks down into it. “And fuckin’ Wes all with the sharpshooting was hitting golds but the bullets weren’t going in too far. It was just making it mad. It knocks me down and it goes for Wes, and I get on its back and try to go for the eyes. And then those Vietnamese sisters and their hot Bronx friend were there and they were screaming at us to pull out the knife, which was kinda tricky ‘cause like, what fucking knife? But I guess Wes saw; it was like jammed in and down right under its throat where I couldn’t see it from behind. So he calls a play so we’d switch, and tries to come around back and take over for me, but it – it got him. And he got back up – because that’s my man, right? Goes down easy. Always gets back up. Went for the knife himself and got his hand on it but he started screaming and he fell down – it got him in the guts. All that pink and red stuff you can’t come back from. And I think – I think – no fucking demon kills my Watcher and walks away alive. So I vault over so I’m on the right side and it’s clawing at me but do I look like I fucking care? Wes is dead. I know he’s dead. And the place is crawling with vamps. One of the sisters is screaming. I get my hand on the knife and yank. Then there’s light. There’s just all this light.”

Rey opens her eyes and is hit with a wave of vertigo so bad she almost falls off the sofa. Giles is turned away, his shoulders shaking. 

“Rey?” Leah asks gently. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Rey says automatically, and then. “What? What the fuck?” She swallows hard. Leah gets up and puts her mug of tea back into her hand. It’s lukewarm, but Rey takes a long drink.

“You have a psychic connection to the Slayer line,” Leah says. “It seems like your dream allowed you to tap into that link to experience the last hour of Faith’s life.”

Giles clears his throat. “Yes – from what I’ve read, the course of attack that – that you dreamt of Wesley recommending, the hits to a series of vulnerable points, executed in strict order, and preferably with a highly-leveraged weapon like an axe, is the only recorded means to defeat the demon. I had assumed that Faith had been critically injured in the course of carrying out those strikes. I admit I have no idea about this knife… unfortunately I wasn’t present for the destruction of the Starkiller demon in Los Angeles. But – I believe a friend of yours, Leah – Edgar De Marino? – was there. He’s on his way here by car.”

Leah seems to shake herself; her glare eases back into an ordinary frown. “Poe’s coming back? Why didn’t he fly?”

“He said he had, ah, multiple reasons. I think you’ll want to speak to his passengers.”

“Passengers?” Leah raises an eyebrow.

“Rey mentioned two Vietnamese sisters who were working alongside their, uh, ‘handsome Bronx friend’… ”

Leah rolls her eyes. “Of course that was Poe.”

“The sisters were Paige and Rose Thai Cô; Paige was killed in the fight that killed Faith and Wesley. Rose… as I say, I believe you’ll find your friend’s passengers… very interesting.” 

Leah gives him a dubious look. “Hmmm. We’ll see, I suppose. When did they leave?”

“Friday morning. I expect it will take at least five days, since I don’t think that, um, Poe, will let anyone else drive.” He looks down into his tea again. “Leah, he’s… he’s bringing you Han’s car.”

Leah goes rigid. “I don’t want it. He should keep it.”

“Perhaps he will, if you ask him to. But that is what he’s driving.”

“That piece of junk. Why would I want it? I have a perfectly good car of my own.” Rey doesn’t know who Han is, but from Leah’s reaction she’s thinking… estranged relative? Ex-husband? She takes a quick look around the room. No pictures.

“Perhaps he thought you’d want to see it. Or sell it; I believe it has some retail value – ”

“It’s trash,” Leah says. _Ex-husband. Has to be._ “He should get rid of it. I’ll call him right now.”

She’s casting around for her phone. “I imagine he’s driving just now,” Giles says mildly. “And he may prefer to sell in New York rather than… wherever he happens to be at the moment.”

Leah relents. “Oh, I suppose,” she says irritably. “And I suppose I ought to let you get to your hotel for some sleep, Rupert. Before you go, do you have any training tips for Rey? She’ll start her second night of patrol this evening.” She adds, “She got two vampires and two demons on her first night out.”

She makes it sounds like it’s an achievement, but Giles only nods vaguely. Rey remembers her dream of being Faith – the towering ash-white demon hard as iron, how easily Faith swung the battle-axe and vaulted one-handed over its shoulders – and feels stupid for the little buzz of pride she’d started to feel.

Giles talks about balance and reflexes and Rey carries her mug to the sink. On the kitchen island there’s a stack of mail. The top envelope is addressed to Han Szolo. _Yep,_ Rey thinks, _must be divorce._

Except that she hasn’t just thrown it out.

* * *

Snoke looks over the lease template and Kylo leans against the deep red wall and lets his mind wander. The building they’ve picked is ideally situated on several mystical lines of dark power, equidistant from the spots of two famously gruesome murders, within the sphere of the cemetery’s melancholy influence, and not that far from the train. Snoke had laughed when he’d pointed out the intersection on the map, applauding the irony. Kylo hadn’t gotten it at first. He remembers his bar mitzvah, and crucifixes barely sting him; the street name is just the name of a subway stop to him. But he can see why Snoke, who was sired in Bohemia in 1618, allegedly by the Holy Vampire Emperor himself, is amused at the thought that he’ll raise hell on Church Avenue.

Snoke taps the papers into a tidy stack with his long pale fingers. Everyone in the room is pale. Hux will fit right in, Kylo thinks sourly as the man takes his forms back.

“I can’t say I understand the appeal of your terms,” Hux sniffs. “No credit checks? No minimum income?”

“You will understand,” Snoke says. “When you’re one of us.” His smile shows the full length of his jagged fangs.

For a moment, Hux seems unnerved. Then he smiles, and puts the papers back in his leather shoulder bag. It’s an oily and remote smile; his eyes are vague. His thoughts are with his own ambitions, not with a building full of people with bad credit and no income, and what vampires want with them. He doesn’t care.

Kylo looks at him. The man’s alive; he has a soul. It doesn’t keep him from being a monster. A soul never kept anybody from being a monster. He doesn’t know what does; whatever it is, he never had it.

_Tai had it. Uncle Luke. Not me._

“Master,” he says, low and surly. “Master, I’m bored.”

He sees Snoke considering. He’s hard-headed, of course, and Hux is his asset. But he’s a demon just as much as Kylo is, and besides, he’s proud of Kylo’s talents. “Very well,” he waves at last. “But don’t damage him.”

“I won’t hurt a hair on his head,” Kylo says. Hux’s eyes dart nervously around, but he doesn’t know enough to keep from meeting Kylo’s gaze and that’s when he has him. Not every vampire can do this. But Kylo can; the demon in him is strong, and it’s part of why Snoke values him. He wraps a little thread around Hux’s mind and he pulls.

“So,” he says slowly. “You want to become a vampire?”

“Yes,” Hux says, docile. “I want it.”

“Why?”

“I want to live forever. I want to be outside the law. I want to be stronger than anyone who’s ever slighted me.” The man’s face twists, and his voice trembles. “I want to kill my father. I want to rip his throat out with my teeth.”

Bile rises in Kylo’s throat. He fights it down. “You’re choking,” he snarls, and Hux’s hands claw at his throat, fighting with nothing as he gasps. Snoke laughs; his guards and the members of his court laugh, and they laugh louder the longer it goes on, and the louder they laugh the safer Kylo is. Kylo wants to laugh, too, but it would be a high, hysterical laugh, so he fights it down. _Oh, you want to kill your father, do you?_

“Forget this,” he whispers at last, and Hux startles, breathing normally but with a lingering light of fear in his eyes.

“Would you like Kylo to see you to your train?” Snoke asks. His laughter is over but his voice still drips mirth, and Hux looks nervously at Kylo’s serious face and clutches his bag a little tighter.

“No. No. I’ll do quite well by myself, thank you.”

Kylo doesn’t watch him go. It feels good, to have power like that. It hurts, too, but then it always does. 

He has to get used to it.

* * *

Giles stays for a few days. Rey appreciates his help; he has excellent advice on how to tell when a vampire’s changed from offensive to defensive fighting, and when it’s worth it to put your weapon in your non-dominant hand. He also explains confusing things, like how come Buffy and Faith overlapped as Slayers if there’s only supposed to be one at a time. But he also always seems to be turning away, or covering his eyes, like it hurts to look at her. He follows beside Leah as Rey slips in the muddy grass of Holy Cross, and calls to her to look out when she uses a crooked gravestone to help her jump the spiked fence after a vamp who makes it out to Cortelyou. But Leah is all in, racing after Rey with an intent face; Giles moves fast, but he always seems to drift a little. As if he were tethered somewhere else.

So Rey’s not very surprised when he looks a little relieved when he says he’s going. He wishes her all the best, and tells Leah he’ll make sure she gets copies of Wesley’s diaries, and promises Rey he’ll put in a good word with the Watchers’ Council about getting her a regular salary. But he’s glad to get away. Rey’s not stupid. She knows he wishes it were still Buffy instead of her.

Who can blame him? Buffy was like a daughter to him; Rey’s somebody else’s daughter. Buffy was the greatest Slayer in recorded history. Rey’s just the one who comes after the second-best one.

Even if she’s getting Wesley’s pension – and who knows how much that is, or when it’ll happen – she still needs money for the next couple weeks. She has a little saved up, but not much. She puts in her usual applications at Starbucks and Target, though even as she’s filling out the forms she wonders whether retail hell plus Slayer strength plus her own not-great temper plus access to hot metal and/or staple guns is really that great a combination.

She plasters her broken doorframe into something that resembles its previous shape. Her lease is up on October 1. She thought this place was a lucky find – it seems to have been carved out of an existing apartment in a way she’s not sure is totally legal, but it’s hers, and it’s only $1200 a month. But maybe she can find a roommate, get somewhere cheaper. As long as she can go in and out quietly, she doesn’t think her vampire slaying ought to bother a roommate. Vampires can’t come into homes if they haven’t been invited, Leah says, and if the roommate doesn’t snoop they don’t need to know that Rey’s nice carved chest is full of extremely sharp things.

She’s putting together a stranger’s IKEA bookcase for $10 (she is _really_ accurate with nails now) when she gets a text from Leah. She’s kind of hoping it’s about a check, but no; apparently the famous (hot?) Poe has arrived with the trash car Leah doesn’t want and so Leah is going to meet him and look at the trash car she doesn’t want and meet the passengers Giles was so mysterious about, so can Rey patrol alone? And then come check in in the morning?

Sure, Rey can do that. It’s her chance to patrol with a sword. Leah advises against the sword; she says a wooden stake leaves her less open and makes it harder for vampires to get inside her guard. But Leah _also_ took Rey to an upscale thrift store and bought her a black leather jacket, and Rey, cuffing her jeans and putting on her extremely good jacket and getting ready to kill vampires, is pretty sure she is just one (1) sword short of living her best bisexual life.

(Plus she shouldn’t get too attached to the brisk, warm way Leia congratulates her every time she wins a fight. She remembers the kids who got desperately bonded to the first foster parent they got. She is not one of those kids.)

And no vampires do get inside her guard, even the older one who’s nice enough to wait by the graveside while his most recent attempt to add to the New York vampire population claws her way out of the grave. She blows dust off the blade and heads for home. She can still tell Leah how many she bagged.

She heads home, thinking about bed, though less about sleep than about other things she can do in it. Slaying is a weird kind of stressful, but, all things and past job situations considered, she’d rather go home horny than harassed and depressed. She’s almost on her own block when she hears footsteps behind her. She doesn’t see anybody when she turns her head, which she thinks is pretty fucking suspicious, and she gets a better grip on the handle of the sword.

“Hello, Slayer,” says a low voice, and look, it’s Mr. Mysterious Scar. Stepping out of the shadows cast by a 24-hour market fluorescents, with his dark eyes fixed on her.

“So are you a vampire or are you in a creepy cult?” she asks, because she has murder-high levels of adrenaline in her bloodstream and she’s not in the mood to fuck around. His steady look doesn’t waver, but he doesn’t answer. Rey does not have time for coy. She inhales deeply, nostrils flaring, and his eyes widen as she catches that thunderstorm smell. Vampire it is.

Her sword flashes out, lit green and silver by late night lights. He jumps back, and she falls back a step, pulling him away from the market. If she goes in, is she going to find the night-shift checker dead at her post? He growls, the demon face coming out with a snarl as he takes a long stalking step towards her. She swings again, stepping into it this time and kicking out with her opposite foot, herding him towards her blade. Some of them can jump like fleas, but she’s thinking this one is too big for that kind of stunt.

He doesn’t jump; he ducks down and close. His hand closes over the knee of her extended leg and he drags her against him. And _shit,_ this is exactly what Leah warned her about, and _God,_ the shame of not even lasting a year – Rey is not going down that easy. She cracks the hilt of the sword against the hard bone of his temple, and he staggers back. He doesn’t let go of her knee; his grip is cold and stony and he drags her with him. She lashes out with the sword again, and he catches her wrist, pulling it up and out. She’s so stupid; she’s so fucked. But she’s not done. She swings her free leg out; if she can get behind his knee and take him down before he can get his teeth in – 

He drops the demon face, his nose inches from hers. The scar down his face and neck is a deep gouged line. “I could help you, you know.”

She stops, frozen in surprise. His electric, demonic smell is so strong; she’s trapped against him. She ought to be dying right now, like the loser excuse for a Slayer she always should have known she was. She’s not Buffy; she’s not Faith; she’s nobody. But he’s just eyeing her. “What are you talking about?” she spits. If he’s offering her a merciful death or something he can fuck right off.

He eases her a little away from him, and the sudden slack she has to work with unnerves her so much that she doesn’t take advantage of it. “Trust me,” he says, his eyes searching hers, a weird little smile on his lips, and a weird chill goes down her neck.

“I’m not going to _trust you,”_ she says, scornful and shivering, and he blinks. The chill recedes. His eyes go a little wide, and she snorts. “How dumb do you think I am?”

He lets her go entirely, backing out of sword-range. She should chase him, but she’s shaken. He had her. That could have been it. What’s he trying to pull?

“I could help you,” he says. He sounds halfway desperate, and Rey is more confused than a dozen blinking white guy gifs. “Do you want to know about Snoke?”

“You’re a vampire,” Rey reminds him, and herself.

“Vampires aren’t all on the same team,” he says, and he seems to find his feet a little. “Vampire sects and fiefdoms have fought each other all through history, just like human kingdoms. The Viennese Empire of Blood and the Immortals of Russia had an out-and-out war.” He looks expectantly at Rey, like she’s supposed to ask a follow-up question, and when she doesn’t, he sucks his lips into his mouth and releases them with a little huff. “I can tell you some things about Snoke. What he knows. When he’s going to move.”

“I don’t trust you.”

He smiles absolutely mirthlessly. “Good. You shouldn’t. Never trust anything without a soul.” He holds out his hand and something flutters to the pavement. “I meant to slip that in your jacket pocket. But you’re… slippery.”

Slippery. He could have killed her. His grip around her wrist, on her knee. She looks down at what he’s dropped. “What is it?”

“My phone number.” He’s backing away.

“You have a _phone?”_

“I’m dead, not a boomer.”

“Boomers have phones these days.”

“Ah, but I know how to use mine. Text me, Rey.”

He turns and lopes into the dark. Rey bends warily down and picks up the paper, a little scrap of a receipt with a 212 number scrawled on it. Rey looks up into the bright lights of the market.

Inside, the register is being minded by a woman who seems both alive and untraumatized. She’s quite intent on her phone; she jumps when Rey comes close. “Hey,” Rey says uncertainly, not even sure what she means to ask. _Seen any gruesome murders lately? Need any help with vampires, citizen?_ “Have you seen a – a really tall guy? White, dark hair? Nice button-down with rolled-up sleeves?”

The cashier nods. “Oh, yeah, he was in a couple minutes ago. Just sort of wandered around in the refrigerated aisles and then left.” She suddenly takes in Rey’s sword. “Oh shit, are you guys cosplayers? I thought I recognized your look; that Netflix show, right?”

“Yeah,” Rey agrees, because sure. 

“I love that show, but it’s so rough to watch sometimes. Also there’s a character with my name, and I was so worried she was going to die horribly or something. Does she?”

“Who?”

The clerk points to her name tag. “Patricia? The sister?”

“Oh, uh…”

“Oh, was your friend looking for meat for special effects? He kept sort of poking everything.” Rey suddenly remembers that he hadn’t tried to kill her that first night, either. And he’d gotten so close. “Did you guys miss each other?” the clerk asks, sympathetically. “Did your phone die? Do you want to use mine?”

“Thanks,” Rey says, turning away in a daze. “I’m almost home; I can plug in there.”

At home, she puts the sword away and showers with the hottest water she can stand. And she doesn’t put the number in her phone; she shoves the little slip of paper deep in her pocket. Where he claims he meant to put it. Then she goes to bed, and prays not to dream.

* * *

Kylo keeps running. He’d thought the few drops of animal blood he’d managed to lick off his fingers in the market might take the edge off, but he’s hungrier than ever. Cows’ blood is disgusting, muddy and sulfuric, and the Slayer smells so sweet. _You had her; you almost had her._ She’d shaken off his trance as if it were nothing, as if his best attempt to capture her mind were a bat of a cat’s paw. _She’d taste so good. Hot and rich. Go back. Hunt her down._

He heads for the subway, taking the stairs three at a time and leaping the turnstile, sniffing madly and trying not to slaver. It’s late; it’s empty. He can find what he wants, and he does. It smells like garbage, and it’ll taste like it, but he needs blood and he needs it now. He chases it, silent and fast, and falls on it with his fangs already out. He kills it before it can even squeal, its filthy blood smearing over his mouth, its coarse fur warm and oily in his hands.

He stands for a moment, swallowing hard and fighting the impulse to retch. He’ll have to go back to his apartment now, to wash. He can’t let Snoke smell the rat on him.

* * *

Rey wakes up to her phone ringing, and for a disoriented, amnesiac moment of sleepiness she thinks she did text him, and now he’s calling her. “Rey?” Leah says. She sounds tense. “Did you get my message?”

“No,” Rey says blearily. “What is it? Do you need me?”

“I asked you to check in. Come up to my apartment, when you can. I want you to meet Poe and his friends.”

Rey takes the rush hour train, packed against successive waves of commuters, and just lets the same song play on repeat. It helps her concentrate, when she’s not surprised by what’s in her ears. _We all have a hunger,_ Florence sings, over and over. Should she tell Leah she went out with a sword? Should she tell Leah how close she let that vampire get to killing her? She has to, right, if she wants to explain why she let a vampire talk to her at all? Give her his fucking phone number? She has to tell her Watcher, even if her Watcher will be so disappointed, because she thought Rey was gifted, and doing well, and not a useless excuse for a Slayer who would be dead if some weirdo vampire hadn’t decided to try to play vampire politics with her. She has to tell her.

God, it’s going to suck, though. Especially since Leah probably wants her to sit and listen to people talk about how Faith died, when Faith was twenty times more experienced and better than her. She leans against the wall in the elevator and tells herself not to be a coward.

Leah introduces Rey to her guests like Rey is a celebrity. The Slayer. Poe is hot, she has to admit, with mussed dark curls and an amused, mobile mouth. He sits on Leah’s couch like he lives there, with his arm stretched out across the back. It sort of gives the impression he’s trying to embrace the couple who are huddled together beside him.

“Hi,” the girl says, with a timid little wave. “I’m Rose. This is Finn.”

“Hey,” Finn says. “Good to meet you.” He looks strained and lost. Rose squeezes his hand.

“Poe, Rose, and Finn were all very involved in the battle with the Starkiller demon,” Leah says. “They don’t currently have a good place to go in LA, so they’re going to be staying with me until they get their feet under them. But I wanted you to meet Finn in particular, because he has some unique insight into Snoke and his plans.”

Her voice is full of weird tensions Rey can’t place; she sounds thrilled, and also like she might cry. Her eyes are boring into Finn, but he’s got something like a thousand-yard stare. Rose plucks gently at the sleeve of his tee shirt.

“Yeah,” Finn says, after a minute. He looks out the windows, down at the floor, towards the door, back out the window. Rose squeezes his hand again and he takes a deep breath and meets Rey’s eyes for just a minute before he looks away again, like he’s about to tell her a lie. Which maybe he does, because he sits there in the morning sunshine and says, “I… I kind of used to be a vampire.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next week on _In All the World:_** "Snoke didn't turn me himself. But a vampire he sired sired me. Gave me blood to drink. I shouldn't have - "
> 
> "You couldn't help it," Rose says fiercely. "You were confused. You were _dying._ Dying people make desperate decisions."
> 
> Finn takes a deep breath, and looks back at Rey. "So I was in his line. In his court - that's what they call it."
> 
> * * *
> 
> Copious thanks to [Bombastique](https://twitter.com/Bombastique1) for reading this chapter. This week's cameo was by [@audreyfan4ever](https://twitter.com/audreyfan4ever) as the clerk who thinks Rey is cosplaying Jessica Jones. [I am once again offering fic appearances in exchange for charitable donations](https://twitter.com/LinearAO3/status/1260753699762307075). If you're not on Twitter, I'm also on [Tumblr](https://linearla.tumblr.com/).


	5. Cursed Medieval Pain-Knife

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This week on _In All the World:_** Poe leans against the back fender, looking out at the underground lot as the rest of them gather around and look down into the trunk. There’re two big zipper-closed plaid plastic storage bags, a battered box full of engine oil, water, and coolant, a gasoline can, and, in the upturned cardboard lid of a printer-paper box, there’s a knife. It’s almost sixteen inches long and thin as a straight razor, with a vicious point. The handle is barely distinguishable from the blade, all of it plain steel, shining under the dim garage lights like it was polished. It looks elegant, and cruel, and familiar. Rey shudders.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains a brief discussion of the civil unrest in Los Angeles in 1992. No knowledge is necessary for the chapter (characters summarize the events) but if you want to learn more, a rough overview is available online [here](http://origins.osu.edu/milestones/may-2017-1992-los-angeles-rebellion-no-justice-no-peace), including a bibliography for further reading.
> 
> On a lighter note, I also invite you to check out this awesome illustration by Ioana Şopov of [Rey with a giant monster-killing sword](https://twitter.com/ioanasopov/status/1261389050784518144).

Rey waits a respectable 30 seconds for him to say he’s joking, or explain that it’s a metaphor, actually, but it doesn’t happen. She wheels on Leah.

“You didn’t say it was fucking _curable!”_

“It’s not. It’s impossible,” Leah says, still looking at Finn. “Vampires kill their human hosts. No one can bring someone back from the dead. But apparently… Rose has.”

“Not by myself,” Rose says, squinching her shoulders up around her ears. “I had help. I was lucky.”

“Don’t let her sell you a line,” Poe puts in. “Yeah, she had help, and yeah, she was lucky, but she’s the one who did it.”

“I had to,” Rose says, almost pleadingly, like she’s been accused of a crime, and then, ferociously, “they _took my boyfriend.”_

Leah exhales, very slowly, like she’s working hard at it. “Yes,” she says. “I… do understand. But how did you do it?

“I do, um,” Rose looks over to Poe anxiously, and he nods encouragement. “My sister and I, we do – did magic sometimes. Just small things, usually. Wards of protection. Mnemonic charms. Freshen up the produce. Stuff like that.”

“Healing, too,” Poe says. “Patched me up good after a vamp got me with the wrong end of my own bat.”

“So I know that – that there are other ways to solve problems sometimes. Secret ways. You have to figure out who to ask, and how to ask. And I was lucky. I went to the guy who sells me Coraean navigation discs and fish mint and stuff, and he told me – ”

“One moment,” Leah interrupts. “Let me get some paper. I should be taking notes.”

“Oh, it’s not complicated or anything,” Rose says, wide-eyed. “It’s just the blood of this particular kind of demon.”

Leah frowns. “Mohra demons?”

“Yeah,” Rose nods.

“They’re almost unbeatable in battle,” Leah says incredulously, “there were only six in our world to begin with, and they were all killed when the Sunnydale Hellmouth was closed.”

“Five of them were,” Rose corrects apologetically. “The sixth one ran to LA and tried to work as a hitman. Somebody hired him to kill a bunch of lawyers who were suing him, but they had… protection. My guy said the lawyers kept almost all the pieces, but that one guy he knew got a finger, and he was selling the blood to sick people and things, and I could buy a drop of blood off him.” She swallows hard, brushing her long bangs back from her face. “So I did.”

Now it’s Finn who takes her hand, very gently. He doesn’t say anything; he just holds her hand, and she leans her head against his shoulder.

“You bought a drop? What, with… money?” Leah sounds stunned.

Rose nods, her face still against Finn’s shirt. “A lot of money,” Finn says hoarsely. “Rose, you – ”

“He said it was the last drop he had,” Rose says, sitting up and wiping her nose. “He told me I had to cut Finn, and put the blood in the cut. So Paige – that’s my sister – she and I – we tried, but we almost got killed by Snoke’s guards. Poe and his squad saved us, and he said the Slayer would want to know what an ex-vampire knew, so he got Faith and she helped us; she held him down while we cut him and put the blood in the wound. And then… we got Finn back.” She smiles at him. Like there’s nothing in the world more worth having than him.

“Finn is the one who told us about the Starkiller demon,” Poe says. “We told Faith everything we could but she – and Paige – ”

“We know,” Leah says soberly. “Rey saw it in a dream the night she was called.”

Finn and Rose both sneak quick glances at Rey, like Rey might be seeing something they’re not, right now. “I just… I sort of knew what Faith knew, I guess?” she says awkwardly. “It sort of seemed like her Watcher was the one who knew about it, and Faith just kind of wanted to… get to the part with the fighting.”

“I _told_ you she wasn’t listening,” Rose grumbles.

“Her Watcher was listening; it’s basically the same thing,” Poe shrugs.

Leah’s attention is on Finn. “You were close to Snoke?” she asks. “Close enough to know his plans?”

Finn ducks his head. “Some of them. Snoke didn’t turn me himself. But a vampire he sired sired me. Gave me blood to drink. I shouldn’t have – ”

“You couldn’t help it,” Rose says fiercely. “You were confused. You were _dying._ Dying people make desperate decisions.”

Finn takes a deep breath, and looks back at Rey. “So I was in his line. In his court – that’s what they call it. All the vampires who do what he says.” He seems to find it a little easier to tell Rey than Leah. Maybe just because she’s closer to his age; he and Rose both look like they could have gone to college with her. “I wasn’t… it wasn’t like he trusted me or anything.”

“Vampires rarely trust one another,” Leah says. “With good reason.” Rey remembers last night. _Never trust anything without a soul,_ he said. She puts her hand in her pocket; the little scrap of paper tickles her finger.

“But he had to tell us some things, so we’d do what he wanted. He told us about the Hellmouth, how it was like a source of evil magic that would make us stronger, and make it easier to feed. So that was good by us. He was going to summon a demon that would open it, and we had to help get ready. The demon feeds on human misery, and we weren’t hating that either. And from that point of view, his plans were pretty solid.” He looks down at Rose’s hand in his. “He wanted to raise the demon on Normandie, by the cemetery. So he was having his court sire black vampires to go to Koreatown and kill people and wreck shit, and then the other way around with Asian vamps and Inglewood. Make people think about ‘92, you know?”

Rey feels dumb. “‘92?”

Leah says, “There was civil unrest. After the police officers who assaulted Rodney King were acquitted. Tensions between the black and Korean communities were very high.”

“A Korean shop owner shot a black girl in the head a year before,” Finn says. “Got off with a fine. And the police -- Rodney King was just what they got on tape. Things were bad. I mean, I wasn’t born then, and things change and everything, but... anyway. People don’t really forget.”

“Snoke was trying to exploit old sites of unrest?” Leah asks. She’s seated herself opposite Finn with her elbows on her knees, leaning forward. “Rey, can you patrol Crown Heights tonight?”

Finn makes an uncertain face. “I dunno. He picked the plan for the place, not the place for the plan.”

“So how did he pick the place?” Rey asks.

“He… had advice, I guess. About mystical forces, lines of power. Shit like that.”

“Advice from Kylo Ren,” Leah supplies grimly.

Finn shifts in his seat. “Yeah.”

Rey is startled when Leah kneels down on the floor and takes Finn’s free hand in both of hers. “Finn. I don’t know what Poe has said to you. Kylo Ren killed my husband, and he’s a danger to my Slayer. That is who he is to me. So please tell us everything you can, without holding back.”

 _Oh shit. Killed her husband?_ It’s not a bad divorce, then. She didn’t want the car out of her sight because she hated the guy; she didn’t want to see it because she knew it would hurt her. _You survived,_ Leah said. _Many people I have loved have not._

“Yeah,” Finn finally says. Leah sits back on her heels, listening. “Kylo Ren told him where to raise the demon. He said it was close enough to the cemetery to have some type of death magic, and was on some other lines of power. I wasn’t really concerned, at the time. It was his idea to use Anaquin's blade for the demon. He said it had enough human misery stored in it to power the demon for more than long enough to open the Hellmouth.”

Rey’s ears ring. _Anaquin's blade._ Her hand feels cold. No, it feels hot. “The knife. In the demon’s chest. I pulled it out. I mean, Faith did. You told her to.”

Rose nods. “When Faith came with us, the second time we came to rescue Finn, Kylo Ren saw us coming; he threw Finn at Faith and yelled at the other vamps he was with to make sure Anaquin's blade was safe. It took us a while to figure it out, but we did.”

Leah’s on her feet, pacing back and forth. “They had Anaquin's blade?”

“Yeah,” Poe says. “Wes told me to look in some of his books while he and Faith went to fight the demon. Turns out it stores all the pain it’s ever created; it’s like an agony battery. Perfect for this thing to run off. They plugged it right into its heart. When Faith pulled it out, it just blew up.”

Leah turns to him. “Who has it now?”

“It’s in the trunk,” Poe says casually. “Wanna see?”

* * *

Kylo checks his phone again. Which is absurd; he’s a vampire – it’s not like he won’t hear his fucking phone. And he ought to be sleeping.

He takes off his shirt. He doesn’t think it has rat blood on it, but he has to be careful. He carries it to the bathroom, watching in the mirror as the tap turns itself on in an empty room. Before he puts it under the water, he holds it to his face. It does smell of rat. But it smells like the Slayer, too, especially down the front, where he’d held her tight against him for a moment.

He shouldn’t let Snoke smell her on him either. He reaches out for the soap, but he doesn’t actually pick it up. He just stands with the shirt against his face, mindless and unreflected, inhaling the traces of every sweet and savory human thing she smells of, until his mouth waters, until he’s hard, until tears prick at his eyes, and then he crumples it into his fist with a snarl.

_She should have been mine._

* * *

“This is grossly irresponsible, even for you, Edgar,” Leah hisses as they hurry through the parking garage. “You know that trunk has never locked properly.”

“Rose put a charm on it,” Poe protests. “And what was I supposed to do, ship a mystical medieval weapon that causes unspeakable pain on contact by registered post? FedEx it, maybe?”

“Tell me you at least got a locked box for it.”

“There wasn’t really time,” Rose says guiltily. “We just sort of scooped it up with some cardboard like it was a big spider and threw it in the trunk.”

Leah mutters something under her breath; Rose looks crushed, but she runs ahead of them to a battered grey-green car that they can’t possibly expect Rey to believe they drove across the fucking country in. Leah might have been speaking out of anger and grief when she called the car trash, Rey reflects, but that doesn’t mean she was _wrong._

Rose covers the trunk lock with her hand, but Rey can still see it flash for an instant between her fingers before it makes a little click and the trunk swings open with a grumpy whine.

Poe leans against the back fender, looking out at the underground lot as the rest of them gather around and look down into the trunk. There’re two big zipper-closed plaid plastic storage bags, a battered box full of engine oil, water, and coolant, a gasoline can, and, in the upturned cardboard lid of a printer-paper box, there’s a knife. It’s almost sixteen inches long and thin as a straight razor, with a vicious point. The handle is barely distinguishable from the blade, all of it plain steel, shining under the dim garage lights like it was polished. It looks elegant, and cruel, and familiar. Rey shudders.

“It’s what they call a misericorde,” Leah says quietly. “A mercy-knife. They’re designed to fit between the gaps of a knight’s armor and put him out of his misery if he’s been mortally wounded. This one is about 800 years old. It was made in Toledo for a 13th-century nobleman with occult interests, but when his pregnant lover used it to kill herself, he laid a curse on it, that it would cause immeasurable suffering on contact with human flesh. It causes so much pain that it was considered useless for torture, since victims are often so traumatized they forget what they’re supposed to confess to. Or their own names. Or how to talk. So,” she adds drily, “don’t touch.”

“And they used this to power that giant demon?” Rey asks.

“Yeah,” Finn says. “It’s got centuries worth of pain stored in it, but it doesn’t hurt if you’re a demon. I never held it myself, but – ” His fingers flex like he’s imagining it, the narrow round hilt in his hand. “I saw other vamps carry it.”

“Do you know where Snoke got it?” Leah asks.

Finn shakes his head. “That was sometime before I was sired.”

“Well,” Leah sighs, “the important thing now is to make sure he doesn’t get it back. Rey, if you’ll stay here with Poe and stand guard, I’ll be back down with a more _appropriate_ box in a few minutes.”

The instant she’s gone back to the elevator with Rose and Finn, Poe turns to Rey with a grin. “Wanna see my weapons collection?”

Rey frowns. “You know I can like, break your ribs with one punch, right? So if this is a euphemism, reconsider.”

Poe waves his hands in the air in front of his face. “Ha. No. What kind of manners do you think I have? I gotta go look my dad in the eye after this. Check this out, though.” He throws open a door, narrowly missing the next car over, and dives into the back seat. “I picked some of these up in LA,” he says, muffled, before he emerges with his arms full of a jumble wood and metal. “See, this straps to your arm, so if you lose one stake you can flex your wrist and you’ve got another. And this looks like it’s just a shitty hubcab, so the cops don’t give you shit, but the edge is sharp and see how it folds out? Voila! An axe. This is my favorite, though.” He drops everything in his arms with a clatter that echoes deafeningly in the garage, and shows her a wooden baseball bat that’s been extended with a stake embedded in the heavy end. “Really lets me use all my little league skills,” he says, with what Rey has to admit is a charming grin.

“So do they call you Poe because your name is Edgar?”

“Partly. Also I used to do walking tours of the Bronx. Start in Highbridge, end in Van Cortlandt Park with the Poe cottage, then wait there and go back the other way.”

“You get paid for that?” She might have to study up, but she could do that. And it’d be good to learn the city a little better. It’s her turf, after all.

Poe shrugs. “Pass the hat at the end, pick up a few bucks. You hard up for cash?”

“Yeah, kinda.”

He inclines his head towards the elevator. “You should talk to the kids. Rose emptied her savings and went pretty deep into debt to get that cure for Finn. And he’s legally dead, so money’s pretty hard for him, too.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Maybe you can come up with something together. One thing is – ” he grimaces, “it’s risky, so I can’t really _recommend_ it, but if you can hold down the vamps before you dust ‘em, they’ve usually got cash in their pockets.”

“Vampires carry _money?”_

Poe shrugs. “Vamps like to buy things too. Usually they took it off their victims.”

Rey thinks very hard about how she feels about that, but doesn’t really come to a solid final conclusion and opts to change the subject instead. She gestures at the modified bat. “So you fight vampires? Are you a Watcher too?”

Poe shrugs. “Nah. Watchers go to special Watcher school and take special Watcher vows; I prefer to just… ” He mimes swinging the bat. “Clean up the dust.”

Rey wonders how he got into it, but he nods to where Leah’s hurrying across the lot with Finn and Rose behind her, carrying a chest, and hurries to put his weapons collection back in the back seat.

Leah very carefully tips the knife out of the cardboard and into the empty chest, where it doesn’t clatter nearly as much as it should. “Is the box enchanted or something?” Rey asks.

“Slightly,” Leah says. “Now, I’ll keep this with me for now. But only until we can find a safer place for it, or figure out how to destroy it. Rey, I’ll come with you tonight; we should patrol Crown Heights and Washington Heights, and Tompkins Square Park, if we have time. Finn and Rose can stay with me for a bit, Poe. You… oh, just keep the damn car.”

“Fantastic,” Poe says, clapping his hands together. “You know where to find me if you want it back. I’ll tell my dad you said hi, yes? And Rey – you ever want backup in the field, just call. I got weapons _and_ wheels now.”

* * *

It’s not for his weapons or his wheels that she calls him in the end; it’s because Rose begs her to. “Please,” she says, her nose crinkled up, pretty and pleading. “He wants to fight vampires, but he’s just a human being. And he’s kind of dumb.”

“I can’t babysit him,” Rey protests. She and Rose are walking dogs for some professor Leah knows. Leah says the dogs were rescued from an animal-testing lab, which maybe explains why they seems so totally unprepared for absolutely everything in life. She’d thought two dog-walkers for three dogs was a pity-hire. Then she spent five minutes with Bunsen, Beaker, and Petri.

“Oh, no, he’s a good fighter,” Rose assures her, scooping Beaker back from moving traffic for the third time in a minute. “He just can’t take more than one on his own, and they don’t always come just one at a time.”

True. Rey went for it with a group of three just last night. She accidentally left her last stake in the third one when he failed the “solid state” challenge – she makes a mental note to carve some more this evening. “He tells you about fighting vampires a lot?”

Rose blushes. “We – Paige and I used to go out with him sometimes. Help out where we could. A little protective charm never hurt anybody, right?” She offers, “I could come with you, too. Put the charm on both of you, if you want? Or just be bait. I’ve been bait a lot.”

“You don’t have to do that!” Rey exclaims, appalled, lifting Petri back onto his feet. He keeps falling face-first into the gutter.

“I don’t mind,” Rose says. “Whatever gets vamps dead, you know?” Her voice is hard.

“But – ” _but what if something goes wrong,_ Rey wants to say. _What if I fuck up, because I’m the geriatric fail-Slayer? What if someone dies because of me?_

“I trust you,” Rose says, with a smile that cuts Rey’s heart into two aching halves. “And we’ll help you.”

They do. Poe’s a reckless maniac, and every other night Rey swears she’ll murder him herself if he somehow survives the demon hordes. But he is _very_ handy with that bat in a tight spot, and he shows her how to work with the oily sheen Rose’s charm casts over them. Finn and Rose bracket them as they work, Rose drawing the vampires out and Finn calling out warnings in a quiet, tight voice.

It’s Finn Rey’s most worried about. He’s already lost his life once, and it seems like it can’t be anything but re-traumatizing to drag him out to face the kind of demon who had possession of his body. But he sets his jaw when she asks him if he wouldn’t rather stay home. “No. I can’t take a vamp in a fight and I won’t try. But if I can help take them down, I will.”

She wants to ask him what it was like, to lose his body to a demon. But she’s afraid to ask; the little glimpses she gets of his joy – tickling Rose with her own hair as she sits on his lap, or snorting into the champagne Leah gives them one night on a whim – seem so fragile and precious she’s afraid to do anything to endanger them.

And they’re good at it, the four of them. They make a good team. Even if the three of them defer to her all the time. She knows why they do it – she’s the one with superhuman strength, accelerated healing, prophetic dreams, and theoretical psychic connection to countless generations of Vampire Slayers – but it makes her uncomfortable. She doesn’t want to stand apart. But she can’t seem to help it, so after a while she just accepts it. What’s one more kind of loneliness?

* * *

Sometimes Kylo does wait in the shadows around her building for the Slayer to leave for the evening. Sometimes he follows her out on patrol, watching as she fights, alone or with help. He knows them all, of course, her helpers, but he doesn’t want to look at them. It hurts to look at them.

He does it to look at her. He loves the way she fights, furious and focused, her face screwed up and her teeth bared. She plants her feet and lunges with all her weight, lashes out with both hands on her weapon. It’ll get her into trouble one day, the way she’s so steadfastly, immediately committed to whatever move she’s chosen, but it’s beautiful to watch. She kicks high and straight, with her toe pointed like a dancer’s, and punches sharp and sudden, like a mean drunk. She leaves no survivors.

She doesn’t text him.

Maybe she doesn’t think she needs information from him now that the lucky one’s with her to tell her everything he remembers from Los Angeles. There’re still a lot of things he could tell her. He thinks of reminding her of that, sometimes, when he watches her walk up the stairs to the front door of her building, her hands deep in her pockets and her boots scuffing the edges of the stone steps. The shape of her stays in his eyes like the afterimage of something burning.

* * *

She would have thought the thing she’d notice most about being a Slayer (when she’s off-duty, that is) is the part where she’s strong enough to lift a 200-pound barbell above her head with one hand. But it’s her sense of smell. Every person has their smell, a cocktail of soap and sweat and daily life. Leia smells like old books and old wood and powdered sugar. Rose smells of cocoa and homemade lemongrass deodorant and Finn, who in turn smells of habanero hot sauce, Old Spice, and Rose. Poe smells of motor oil, annatto, and the magic markers he lets his little cousin “tattoo” him with. (“BB8EVA” in black ink on the back of his neck; “I ♥ BUTS” his wrist says, in smudgy purple, and Poe shrugs, “Not wrong.”)

Every bored stranger on the subway, every adrenaline-soaked near-miss victim she saves – they all have their own smells, of coffee and houseplants and terror. She notices it before she notices the color of their hair. It almost feels like she’s added a whole new sense.

And it’s kind of a problem. Because half the time, by the time she’s done slaying every night, she’s so horny she’s considering rubbing herself against Poe’s baseball bat, and it seems like the obvious solution is to, like, mention that to Poe himself, since he is still hot as fuck, and also brave and helpful, and also not one half of a monogamous relationship, and, most importantly, there. Within arm’s reach. But the smell _absolutely kills it for her,_ not just the magic markers that remind her of social workers and foster homes, but something in him that smells… too wholesome. Like family might smell, if she had a family. Despite his sweaty curls and flirtation, she can’t fuck him any more than she could climb up on someone’s table and fuck their home-cooked dinner.

She follows a host of truly embarrassing Insta accounts and tries not to leave thirst-likes her handful of followers can see. She watches porn clips. But she can’t smell it, all that pixelated flesh. She’s trying to get off to shadow puppets. Her imagination is better, but her imagination – well.

Just once, on her way home (or what’s home for now; she and Rose and Finn are looking for a two-bedroom to split), she smells vampire and lifts her head, and she thinks she sees, just in the corner of her eyes, soft dark hair and scarred white skin. She remembers the tension of muscle, his grip on her knee.

She leans against her door and takes out the little scrap of paper, types out the number in to _To:_ field. In the message box, she types:

> _Do vampires fuck?_

But she doesn’t send it.

She lies down on the bed and tucks her face into the crook of one arm while her other hand works frantically underneath her jeans. No one’s name on her lips, just a muffled moan as she soaks her fingers and jerks her hips until she comes, thinking fixedly of nothing, because physical exertion got her here and so physical exertion can damn well get her off.

* * *

When humans fuck, they smell of one another. She never smells of anyone but herself. He remembers a volume, from the late 1700s, an account of Slayers written by an unhealthily obsessed clergyman – _maidens and warriors, with the ferocity of Deborah and the surpassing purity of Mary._

He can smell her. He’d like to dispute the diagnosis.

He thinks, _Maybe nobody's enough for her, now that she's the Slayer. Maybe she's too afraid of hurting someone._ That would be like her. He can see how much she loves her own strength, but also the way she shrinks back from hugs and handshakes. _She cares for them. She wants to be careful with them._

But in the daylight dark of his apartment, after he’s seen her, he lies sleeplessly on his bed and thinks, _She still wants it, though, doesn’t she? Oh, she does. Wants it so bad she dreams about it. Wants it so bad she’s desperate. Wants it so bad she'd take it from anyone. Anyone at all._

He thinks of her sexual deprivation like a fever, hot and humid, because that's how he likes to think of it, because it warms his cold blood to think of the seam of her jeans rubbing tight against soaked panties, and her squeezing her thighs together like squeezing fruit, the sweet juice running down. And because he is a monster, he thinks of falling on her, snatching her from behind with the band of his arm pinning both of hers so she can’t escape; he thinks of his fingers over her clothes, and her body under them, unfucked and dripping. Thinks of her rage and her struggle, grinding herself into his hand. _Look at you, Slayer. Look how desperate you are. You'd let anybody do this, wouldn't you. That's it. That’s it. Whimper for me. You can beg if you want._

And he thinks and thinks, a monster curled up tight on the human bed where he can never sleep; he thinks of her begging, for his cock, for his mercy. He thinks of her neck between his teeth and her naked body shivering and shaking under his hands. Wet and warm around his cock as he thrusts in and wet and warm on his tongue as he bites down. He's a demon wearing a weak man’s body as a thin disguise and he thinks of reminding her, her blood on his lips as he whispers in her ear, her hands clawing at his back and her legs tight around his waist, _You wanted this. Wanted it so bad you'd take anybody. Even a monster. Even me. Take it, Slayer. You wanted it. Take it. Take it. Take me. Rey._

He doesn’t really care about his clothes afterwards. Snoke doesn’t care who he fucks or how; he never has.

* * *

Rey’s with Finn, looking at a two-bedroom six blocks from the J while Rose proctors exams at Brooklyn College, when Leah calls. She excuses herself and ducks into the hallway, expecting just a suggestion for the night’s patrol. But as soon as she says hello, Leah asks, “Can you come to my apartment tonight?”

“Sure,” Rey says, startled. “What time?”

Leah pauses, listing appointments under her breath. “Seven. Come alone.”

“Alone? Why?”

“We’re going to take Anaquin’s blade to someone who can protect it. The fewer people who know where it is, the safer it’ll be.”

“Can I at least tell them why we can’t all go?”

“Yes. I trust Finn and Rose will understand. And my next call after this is to Poe’s father, to make sure he actually _stays home_ for once.”

Rey can’t help imagining Poe sulking on his bed, glaring at his phone like a grounded teen. “If that’ll work, sure.”

Leah sighs. “All we can do is try.”

When Rey dutifully turns up that night, she expects to be loading the (magically-locked-three-times-over-by-Rose-and-Leah) chest with the cursed medieval pain-knife in it into Leah’s car, but to her surprise, Leah just leads her out through the lobby and up Amsterdam. Rey settles the chest a little more comfortably on her shoulder. “Where are we going?”

Her Watcher sets a brisk pace. “You know, the first nuclear fission reaction in America was accomplished on the Columbia campus. The Manhattan Project began in Manhattan, in an underground particle accelerator.”

“Okay?” Rey sometimes forgets what, exactly, Leah is a professor _of,_ since it’s long and hyphenated and split across multiple departments, but she’s fairly sure it’s _not_ nuclear physics.

“The lab was sealed off from the outside,” Leah says. The red brick of the college dorms is a block away. “But, in the 1980s, some students got in using the steam tunnel system. The tunnels are older than the school; they were built for the service of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, which used to stand here. Two students were caught with uranium 238 in their dorms, and expelled. The tunnels were shut down and sealed off. But there was a third student who went down with the other two.”

“What happened to her?”

“She didn’t come back up. Rey, the bones of the Manhattan Project didn’t lie undisturbed in the middle of a crowded campus for forty years for no reason. There is powerful magic underground here, suitable for keeping secrets. The third student became its guardian. I’ve been in communication with her, and she’s agreed to take the blade.”

“‘In communication?’ How do you communicate with someone who’s been in an underground tunnel since 1980-whatever?”

“Email,” Leah says calmly. “The University gave everybody an email address in the 90s, and she’s no exception.”

“Is she on the payroll?” Rey snorts, as Leah nods to the security guard stationed by the big iron gates. “If they’ll pay a dropout student to be a mystic guardian, will they pay me to keep vampires off campus?”

“She’s not a dropout,” Leah says reproachfully. “She got her PhD.”

“From the steam tunnels? I have a BA from City College!”

Leah keys open a door in a stone alcove with her ID card and hustles Rey through. “There’s a hiring freeze, Rey. You know I’m trying to find you a living wage; if I thought I could find you one on campus, you’d have it by now.”

“I know,” Rey mutters, as she follows Leah down a metal staircase. “Thank you.” The stairs are old; they ring with every step, but the sound seems muffled by the dust which clings to the peeling paint on the walls.

They stop in front of a battered steel door with a chipped plaque that says _Maintenance._ Leah digs into the pockets of her long grey coat, making grumpy sounds until she produces a stick of chalk and a handful of what looks like red sand. She writes on the door with the chalk, left to right and then right to left, in an alphabet Rey doesn’t know and can’t guess, letting the sand slip slowly through her fingers as she whispers to herself. She writes one last word three times, larger every time, and then throws what’s left of the sand at the door. It flashes blindingly and makes a mild little click. Leah turns the handle. All the chalk and sand have vanished.

Leah peels off her coat, and Rey takes seven steps into the tunnel beyond the door before she does the same with her leather jacket, throwing it over the top of the chest. It’s sweltering; heavy tubes bolted to the low, rounded ceiling breathe heat down on them from every angle. The tunnels are barely lit, and Rey has no idea how Leah knows which turns to make in their branching paths. But after what feels like half a mile of walking through a sauna, they come to a plain wooden door with a plain round doorknob and a plaque in the same inscrutable letters Leah had written in chalk. Leah knocks twice, briskly. “Dot! It’s Leah; I brought the Slayer and the blade,” she calls, and opens the door.

The room is cluttered with crowded shelves, all oriented around a messy, battered desk. The woman behind the desk is short and round, with a cozy mass of curly hair, and round glasses. She is wearing a white shirt with a long, dark bib of congealing blood down the front, spilling from a gaping, ragged wound in her neck, and she is very, very dead.

Rey just stands and stares. She’s seen dozens of vampires crumble into dust, demons explode into swarms of insects or collapse into puddles of goo, but she’s never seen this before. A dead human being. _This is what I’m supposed to stop,_ she thinks, woozily. _I’m supposed to slay things so they don’t do this._

In the first moment of discovery, Leah’s breath had gone in a gasp, but now she’s walking towards the corpse with squared shoulders. “Shouldn’t we – not touch – stay back?” Rey protests. How long has she been dead? What if she was sired?

“Do you think we’re going to call the cops, Rey? We’re the only detectives she’s going to get.”

Rey doesn’t feel like a detective. She watches Leah carefully pick her way around the desk and she feels sick. Leah’s cool as ice; she’s got her nose practically _up against_ the wound, peering through her glasses. Rey turns her head away. Which is when she smells it.

“Leah,” she hisses. There are footsteps in the hall outside, not very far off, and the smell of vampires. And here she is without any weapon besides an untouchable torture implement locked in a magic box. “Leah, get down! Hide!” She glances around. All the shelves are made of metal; no snapping off a shelf for a stake.

“I don’t see how anyone could have beaten us here,” says a woman’s voice, echoing in the hall. “Do you think any other vamp in this town knows Latin?”

“Some of them are old. Like, really old.” There’s two of them. Two vampires.

“Not _that_ old.”

“No, but like, old-white-man old. Mandatory-Latin-class old.”

“‘Knows Latin’ and ‘sat in Latin class a century ago’ are very different things, Kat. And nobody’s glossed that door spell in any language newer than Latin, I promise you.”

Rey’s still casting around for something sharp when she feels a tug on her cuff. “Okay, _Sulpicia,”_ the second vampire says, with an audible eyeroll, and Rey goes where Leah’s pulling her, down behind the desk. She’s not supposed to hide; she’s the Slayer. The vampires are supposed to hide from _her._ But Leah seems insistent. “So do we just tear the place apart until we find the gnosis codex or – ”

“Shit,” the first vampire says. “Someone did beat us here. Smell that blood?”

“Maybe they didn’t find the book, though,” the other says hopefully. “We should check.”

“I hope they didn’t,” the first mutters. “I want Snoke’s fucking prize.”

Rey looks where Leah is pointing – the dead woman’s chair. The legs have thin wooden struts. She reaches over and grabs one; it snaps off in her hand.

“What was that?” one vampire asks, and Rey jumps to her feet to see a tall, brown-haired vampire standing in the doorway, another looking over her shoulder. When they see Rey they growl, fangs emerging with their demons’ faces, and Rey doesn’t feel compelled to answer the question; she just rolls over the desk to meet the vampires’ charge.

“Try to keep one alive!” Leah calls, as Rey kicks one in the chest and knocks her into the other. “I have questions!”

“Right!” Rey calls back, with absolutely zero conviction, as she trips the one in front and lunges for the chest of the one behind. She takes a punch to the face, which hurts like hell, but eh. She’ll heal. She can’t say the same for the vamp, who turns to dust around her little sliver of stake as her friend tries to bite Rey’s leg and gets a knee in her bony demon nose for the trouble. Rey kneels on her chest with her stake to her heart. “Leah? Question time expiring soon!”

“What did you come here for?” Leah barks, running forward. “Why?”

“Fuck you, Watcher,” the vampire growls, and Leah kicks it in the head. The vamp laughs, and Rey belts it across the mouth. It curls a bleeding lip at her. “Am I supposed to believe you’ll spare my life? Slayer?” She surges up, grasping for Rey’s throat, and Rey shoves the stake in. Her knees clunk to the floor in the dust.

Leah sighs. “Sorry, Rey. It was a long shot. But I thought I had to try.” She turns and looks meditatively at the corpse. “I only told her what I was bringing two days ago. I don’t know how the word could have gotten out.”

“One of them said something about being here for gnosis,” Rey says, brushing dust from her jeans. “Because Snoke was offering something.”

“Snoke. Of course it was Snoke.” Leah’s face is pure disgust.

“Gnosis codec. You said you just emailed? Maybe she got hacked somehow? Are there vampire hackers?”

“Yes,” Leah says absently. She taps her fingers together. “Gnosis codec? Gnosis codex?” She wanders to the shelves, running her fingers over spines and labeled boxes, not quite touching them. “The Tunnel Collection is full of rare and dangerous objects. Perhaps it was nothing to do with the blade. Perhaps it was something… ” On a low shelf, her fingers cross a gap. “Something else entirely.”

“What was there?” Rey demands.

Leah examines the books on either side of the gap. “Katrolian Inscriptions… Kunbi Scrolls...”

“Gnosis?” Rey says again, helpfully.

 _“Knossos,”_ Leah says decisively. “The Knossos Codex.” She turns back to Rey frowning. “A vampire – or vampires, plural, came here. They broke Dot’s neck before she could get up, but they left a messy wound, as if she had struggled and forced them to tear her throat out. They fed off her when she was dead, but left enough that some still spilled from the wound. They went directly to where the book was stored and took it, presumably for Snoke. But not in a coordinated effort, because these two didn’t know it was already gone.”

“They made it sound like it was a competition.”

“Too many vampires,” Leah murmurs, troubled. “Too many vampires who know too much.”

“Is this about that Watcher vampire?” Rey asks, and Leah’s face becomes a cold mask. She turns away from Rey.

“We’ll have to take the blade back to my apartment. I’ll make funerary arrangements from home.”

* * *

Leah evades every question Rey puts to her after that, about the tunnels, the vampires, the missing book. Usually she’ll tell Rey more than she can retain, so this is unnerving. She wants to talk to Rose and Finn, but they’re still staying with Leah and Leah doesn’t let her linger in the apartment. She doesn’t tell her to patrol, either, though there are still hours and hours of night left. “Go home,” she says. Her voice is hoarse and stressed. “Be careful. I’ll be in touch tomorrow.”

Rey texts Rose from the lobby.

> _Know anything about a book called the kinosos codex?_

She dawdles on the way to the subway, a fresh stake tucked into her coat, absent-mindedly sniffing the crowds of drunk co-eds for vampires. After a bit, her phone buzzes.

> _🌹 : No. Finn says there’s an ancient city called Knossos but he doesn’t know anything about a book  
>  🌹 : Should we ask Leah?_
> 
> _Me: No she’s being weird_

The 1 arrives promptly, and Rey lets it rock her quietly towards her transfer. Leah is upset, obviously. Rey can tell she feels betrayed by the Watcher who failed; she’s pretty sure Leah’s parents were both Watchers, and she clearly takes it personally.

But Rey wants to know.

She enters the number slowly, and the unsent message pops up. _Do vampires fuck?_ She deletes it.

> _What can you tell me about a book called the Knossos Codex?_

She’s at 59th St when she presses send, and changes trains for Brooklyn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next week on _In All the World:_**
>
>> _I'll make you a trade, Slayer._  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> Kylo's recollection of an 18th-century account of Slayers is my hat-tip to the amazing _Angel: the Series_ fic [The Uninvited Guest.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/32695/chapters/43468)
> 
> If you thought this was too much about the [Columbia University Tunnels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University_tunnels), wait until the forthcoming chapters where I struggle not to go Full Victor Hugo on the NYC subway system. This week's cameos were by [QueenOfCarrotFlowers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenOfCarrotFlowers), as the murdered archivist, and [lothkat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lothkat) and [Jenn](https://twitter.com/magistraJ) as book-hunting vampires. ~~There are two cameo/bit-part slots remaining[in exchange for donations to worthy causes](https://twitter.com/LinearAO3/status/1260759901195980800).~~ All the current cameo slots have been filled; thank you so much to everyone who has generously donated! My thanks to the gracious [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/Bombastique1)) for reading this chapter; all faults remain my own. I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/LinearAO3) and [Tumblr](https://linearla.tumblr.com/).


	6. Scarface

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This week, on _In All the World:_**  
> 
> 
> “Right,” she says curtly, brandishing her stake. “Who wants some?”
> 
> A vampire appears behind her, in that materializing-out-of-darkness way they do. She looks Rey up and down, still in her human face. “Who wants some of what? You?” She’s slowing the transformation of her face to make it scarier, eyes creepily changing color. “I like to know who I’m eating, little girl.”
> 
> Rey is inclined to answer the implied question with a left hook, but Scarface, the interfering fucker, chimes in from the dark edge of the brick archway. “Into every generation, there is a chosen one.” He says it slowly, like an incantation, dark satisfaction in his voice. “One girl in all the world. She alone will wield the strength and skill to stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness, to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their numbers.” He steps forward, heavy black leather shoes on pale grey stone as the warm light of the bridge lights his face. “What I’m saying is… she’s the Slayer.”

He knew she would.

**Rey:** What can you tell me about a book called the Knossos Codex?  
  


He remembers reading somewhere that there was a social consensus that you shouldn’t text back immediately, that it looks bad. So he counts to sixty, and then adds her to his contacts as slowly as he can before he starts typing his reply.

**Me:** It’s a book of prophecies. Actually translations of prophecies into Latin; the original is no longer extant and in a language that’s no longer known. There are fifty prophecies in the book; forty-nine of them are considered to have come true.  
  
**Rey:** Did you just use a semicolon in a text my dude  
  
**Rey:** AND SPELL OUT 49  
  
**Rey:** Are you sure you’re not a boomer  
  
**Me:** Yes.  
  
**Rey:** Anyway that’s not super helpful  
  
**Rey:** Snoke wants it and I want to know why  
  


He licks his lips and swallows hard.

**Me:** I’ll make you a trade, Slayer.  
  


A long pause. He waits for her to say something like _I don’t bargain with vampires_ or _Do I look like a mark, demon?_ But all she says is

**Rey:** What  
  


His hands feel cramped. He flexes his fingers, trying to shake off the tension.

**Me:** I’ve got a problem.  
  
**Rey:** Big deal I have like a hundred  
  
**Me:** Mine is a vampire. I want him dead and I’m told you’re a specialist.  
  
**Rey:** Why tf shouldn’t I start w you  
  
**Me:** If you help me kill him, I’ll give you an English translation of the fiftieth prophecy.  
  


Another long pause. He puts the phone down and tries to think of something else he could be doing. The phone buzzes and he snatches it up.

**Rey:** What do vampires have beef about anyway? Who’s more bloodthirsty and evil??  
  
**Me:** We’ve all got plans, Slayer. Pryde’s and mine don’t mesh well.  
  
**Rey:** He wants to eat people on the same street corner you do huh  
  
**Me:** Yes, and he’s a very messy eater.  
  
**Rey:** Be straight with me scarface  
  


He puts the phone down again and runs his hands through his hair, trying to think about Pryde and not _be straight with me scarface_ and all the ways it hurts. Pryde is the problem. _He doesn’t trust me, and Snoke will listen to him._ He can’t say that. _Snoke respects him more than he respects me._ No.

**Me:** He could be an ally to Snoke. I don’t want that to happen, and neither do you.  
  


The pauses are so long. He has nothing to do, and eternity to do it in. Slayers’ lives are infamously brief candles, but she’s going to spend all night deciding whether to say yes or no to a simple request to do what she’s supposed to be doing anyway.

**Rey:** Fine sure whatever  
  
**Rey:** I’ve got a stake youve got a vamp lets do this thing  
  


He wipes his palms and sends her a pin and licks his teeth, which still taste deliciously of blood.

* * *

DUMBO, huh. Scarface’s enemy has expensive tastes. Rey loiters outside a noisy bar decorated to look like a cheap Mexican restaurant and keeps her hands in her pockets. She has a stake in each one. She’s not ready to fight two-fisted yet, but it might be a goal. She’s pondering the logistics of this – punches more awkward? – when she smells him in the wind off the river, and strides to meet him before he looks at the bar crowd and starts getting peckish.

“So,” she says. “I’m guessing he’s not actually _here._ Or is he one of the ones who picks people up in bars and eats them on the way home?”

“No,” he says. “That’s tedious, and Pryde wouldn’t bother.”

“So where are we going?”

“Down by the water,” he says, inclining his head. She walks in the direction he indicates, and he follows her. Not as closely as she needs him to; she speeds up a little, so he has to, too, and then jerks backwards a step and smashes him into the clean concrete doorway of some tech startup, pinning him to the inside wall with one shoulder. He’s strong, maybe even stronger than the last time she fought him, but she’s got a stake pressed to his heart, which is a fairly serious advantage. He goes limp.

“Couple of quick questions,” she says. He’s looking at her eyes like he can see through them into her head. _How empty do you think it is in there, pal?_ “How the fuck do I know you’re not from Snoke’s court or whatever the fuck you call it?”

“You don’t,” he says. “But I’m not in Snoke’s bloodline. He’s not my sire, or my grandsire, or my great-grandsire.”

She shifts a little. She’s strong enough that she’s not too worried about keeping him pinned like this, but something about the way her shoulder fits against his chest is… and she thought he’d offer something. Some kind of proof. Instead he’s just asking her to – “You’re the one who told me never to trust anything without a soul.”

“Yes,” he agrees. “Don’t trust me. But gamble on me, Slayer.” His voice resonates through muscle and bone of his chest, into her body. “Take a risk.”

“Why should I? Why should I risk walking into a trap just so you can tell me something my Watcher might tell me in eight hours?”

He gives her a black look. “Your Watcher can’t tell you what I can.”

“Which is?”

“Help me kill Pryde. I’ll give you what I promised.”

“Who is Pryde, and why do you need my help? You’re strong; do it yourself. I’ll even give you a stake.”

“Pryde is… ” He sighs a little. She can feel the sigh; it touches her hair gently. “He’s not in Snoke’s bloodline, but he’s… related to Snoke. In theory. They both claim to be in the bloodline of the Vampire Emperor. Pryde was turned in the 1930s.”

“So he’s not old enough to have the creepy perma-demon face.”

“No. That sets in around age four hundred.”

“So why do you need my help?”

He shifts a little, now. She’s got her shoulder and her arm and her hip all pressed against him, pinning him against the wall of the concrete recess. “He doesn’t hunt alone. He’s got a small court – two or three younger ones. If I kill him but a witness escapes, Snoke finds out. If you attack, they’ll stand and fight. They won’t run.”

“Why not?” It’s a question that’s troubled her before. She’s the Slayer. If she were a group of vampires, and someone called the Vampire Slayer showed up, she would at least _consider_ scattering. But they hardly ever do. “Why won’t they run?”

His long serious face bends close to hers, and she sees his nostrils flare and his pupils dilate as he half-whispers it: _“You smell too good to leave.”_

She jerks away from him, stepping backwards onto the sidewalk. He doesn’t spring after her, just stays where he was, watching her. 

“Glory, too,” he says, after a moment, casually, almost languidly, as if he hadn’t just said… the other thing. “To be a vampire who kills a Slayer – it’s a distinction.”

“Well,” she mutters, “don’t get any ideas about getting distinguished.”

He pushes away from the concrete wall and strides down towards the river. “Not tonight.”

He leads her along the edge of Brooklyn, in sight of the water, the Brooklyn Bridge looming larger and larger as they get closer to it. It’s only a block or two away when he stops, and nods his head. She looks around.

“The carousel?” she asks. 

“No.” He keeps his voice low. “Not to the right. To the left. There are arches, and a garden.”

“Vampires prefer a garden to a creepy shuttered carousel?”

“Young lovers prefer the garden, so yes.”

Why are vamps such assholes? People just want to have makeouts in a moonlit garden by the river and they have to hang around committing homicide. She scowls at the vampire next to her.

“Fine. You stand by the arch and get anybody who tries to run.”

He blinks. “I told you, they won’t run. And you’ll need help.”

“Then help. Whatever.” She takes out one of her stakes and hands it to him, gets a good grip of her own on the other. “Just… don’t get in my way.”

And with that Rey heads in, heedless of his warning hiss, because if this is a trap, she’s not going to navigate it at his speed. The cold East River wind fills her jacket and her lungs, and she’s ready to fight.

She ducks through the arch into the speckled shade of the garden. It’s a little space, but the flowering bushes hide twisting paths and benches she can just glimpse between branches. The shadows are complicated, split between the moon and the bridge lights, and Rey peers at dark shapes that could be anything. But she knows they’re there.

“Right,” she says curtly, brandishing her stake. “Who wants some?”

A vampire appears behind her, in that materializing-out-of-darkness way they do. She looks Rey up and down, still in her human face. “Who wants some of what? You?” She’s slowing the transformation of her face to make it scarier, eyes creepily changing color. “I like to know who I’m eating, little girl.”

Rey is inclined to answer the implied question with a left hook, but Scarface, the interfering fucker, chimes in from the dark edge of the brick archway. “Into every generation, there is a chosen one.” He says it slowly, like an incantation, dark satisfaction in his voice. “One girl in all the world. She alone will wield the strength and skill to stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness, to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their numbers.” He steps forward, heavy black leather shoes on pale grey stone as the warm light of the bridge lights his face. “What I’m saying is… she’s the Slayer.”

“A _Slayer.”_ Rey spins towards the new voice, which is dry and British and patrician. “Why, Juno, fancy that. I haven’t seen one of those since I was in Rio.”

Leah said vamps selected for youth and strength, but Pryde – it has to be him – is thin and grey-haired; unlike Giles, there’s no hint in him of past vitality. He looks like he was born bored, made to recline in a fancy chair and smoke disdainfully. But he reeks of danger. So Rey gives no warning, just thrusts with the stake, and goes stumbling, pain shooting up her arm. She whirls, lashing out, but there’s no one there. She looks about wildly – two vampires are running for her, the brunette he called Juno and another one, a square-shouldered man with blond hair.

Rey tucks her injured arm close to her chest and kicks them, him in the teeth and her in the knees. She scrambles over the fallen brunette to stake the blond before he can get up; he half-rises and tries to grab her arm, but she knees him in the stomach and jams the stake down. She rolls forward through his dust and jumps to her feet, attacking with a roundhouse kick that sends Juno down again and gives her a moment to look around for Pryde.

He’s fighting with Scarface, both of them striking out with fists and fangs, snarling dark shadows among the flowers and leaves. Rey doesn’t have a chance to note much else before Juno’s flinging herself on her, and Rey has to duck and roll, throwing an elbow-check to keep herself free before she can turn and circle. The vampire glares at her with yellow eyes. “What do you think you’re doing, Slayer?” 

“My job,” Rey retorts, and charges at her. She blocks, and Rey punches upwards and then tries a low leg-sweep, which doesn’t quite work but does drive her backwards. She aims a blow at Rey’s hurt arm, and Rey feints a dodge before she turns into the blow and slips under the vampire’s elbow to ram the stake into her heart and yank it out before she falls to powder.

 _Fuck,_ her right arm hurts. What did he even do to her? She flexes her bicep and winces; it sort of feels like the muscle is torn. Shit. She adjusts her grip on the stake in her left, and dashes into the bushes after Pryde.

She’d thought of a fencer the first time she saw Scarface, the way his steps lunge forward. Every step now is part of a blow or a block, all the power of his long legs thrown into driving Pryde back and back and back. But Pryde moves like a snake, dodging and striking with unnerving strength. Their gargoyle faces growl at one another.

“I knew you were a mad dog,” Pryde is hissing. He throws a vicious backhand and Scarface is rocked back on his heels. “You’re worthless. As bad as that jibbering bitch Angelus made.” Scarface roars and snatches for his throat. Pryde darts backwards at the last second, and Scarface goes down on the flat stones, stake jolting from his hand. Which looks an awful lot like Rey’s cue. 

She runs like she means to tackle him, then switches into a spin and an uppercut, and is intensely satisfied to make contact with the slippery bastard. She presses the advantage, striking high again and again, trying to make him give in to the instinct to protect his face so she can go for his chest. But the bloodless bastard doesn’t seem to have any fucking instincts; he just stares at her with unblinking, reptilian eyes as she punches and punches until she’s yelping with frustration.

“You’re new,” he says cooly. “But rather old for a Slayer. And what are you doing with him, hmmm?”

“Business,” Rey grits. Ignoring the pain in her arm, she drops the stake back into her dominant hand. If he won’t move his guard, she’ll move it for him. She seizes his left wrist in her left hand, and twists. But she should have known better than to grapple with him; he spins her away like she’s a dance partner and she falls gasping into the dirt beneath the bushes. Then iron-hard, iron-cold fingers grip her from behind, and lift her like a rag doll.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” Pryde breathes in her ear, and she aims a vicious jab of her elbow to his throat. It goes straight through; she drops and falls into a crouch, and looks up to see Scarface, his human eyes wide and glued to hers, and his stake stuck into the swirling cloud of dust where Pryde used to be.

There’s a long, long moment where neither of them says anything. He’s sweating, Rey notes absently. She can smell it, and it plasters a lock of his hair to his forehead. She’s never fought with a vampire long enough to see one sweat. How… human.

“You’re hurt,” he says, and then, “you shouldn’t try a joint hold if you don’t know how it works.” It’s obnoxious, like he’s trying to mansplain slaying to her, but there’s a strain in his voice and as she rises to her feet his gaze has weight, like a coat draped over her shoulders.

“You wanted him dead and he’s dead. No witnesses. Just like you wanted.”

“You’re bleeding,” he says, and his eyes settle on her left hand. She glances down; she split her knuckles, that’s all, presumably on Pryde’s bony demon face.

She makes a dismissive noise. “That’s nothing; I’ll – ”

“Please,” he says hoarsely, and her stomach twists. He sounds desperate. Sick. Like someone begging for a hit. He takes a step forward, through the dappled shadows of the garden, eyes still fixed on her hand. “Just a drop.”

She jerks backwards. “That was _extremely not_ in the Terms and Conditions!”

He wrenches his eyes back up to hers. “Please. One drop. You can put it – on a piece of paper. Or fabric.” He fumbles in his pockets. “Here, I have a handkerchief – ” 

“I’m not _feeding_ you.”

He licks his lips, and her stomach twists in a different way. “Please,” he says one more time, soft and hopeless as he looks into her eyes. She licks her own lips, and knows he sees her do it.

“Give me your handkerchief,” she says, and he shoves it at her with shaking fingers. She wraps it around three of the four bleeding fingers, leaving just one uncovered. His eyes widen when she extends the bare index finger to him. “If I see or feel a _hint_ of fang, you’re dead; do you understand?” She raises it to his face, and waits breathlessly for the touch of his tongue. 

He bows his head forward, letting her fingertip rub over the soft pad of his lower lip before he takes her whole finger into his mouth.

She gasps, and he half-staggers, almost falling towards her; his eyes flutter shut as he seals his lips and sucks, rolling his tongue around and around her finger with a stifled moan. His tongue is soft and wet and cool, and he strokes her finger with it in a slow, voluptuary rhythm. She stares at him, his wide shoulders tense in the glimmering light of the bridge and the moon, his wide soft lips shut tight around her finger. He wraps his hand around her wrist, caressing it gently with his thumb as he sucks a little harder, and Rey shivers. The faintest whimper escapes him, and a thousand wild thoughts fill her head; she snatches back her hand.

He looks like he’s been stunned senseless, staring at her with his lips parted just the width of her finger. _He’d give me anything now,_ she thinks. It’s a cold-blooded thought, and so she seizes on it, because it’s not the thought of a person whose whole chest is hot as she tries to get her breath back. Not the thought of a person whose heart is pounding in her ears. A person who wants to lean back towards that open mouth and open it wider with her tongue.

“Tell me about Snoke,” she demands unsteadily. 

He sounds dazed. “What about Snoke?” 

“Where is he? What does he want?”

“His lair’s in Fort Greene. He wants to open a Hellmouth.”

“Does he have any weaknesses? Anything I can use?”

“None. He’s strong. Probably the strongest vampire in the Americas.” He says it blankly, like it doesn’t even matter. His eyes are still glazed.

“What does he want with the prophecy? Is that about the Hellmouth?”

“I don’t know. I’m still translating.”

She takes a step backward. “Translating? You already have it?” He blinks. She fumbles for her stake with her good arm, realization dawning, his handkerchief still wrapped around her knuckles. “You’re the one who took it. Aren’t you? You killed that woman.”

The dazed look is gone; something dangerous and angry flickers behind his eyes. “Of course I did. How did you think I got it?”

“I thought someone _else_ got it – I thought you were going to – to steal it, or sneak a look, or – ”

“I killed her. I ate her.” He takes a slow, stalking step forward. “You knew I was a monster, didn’t you?”

And she did. She did. She just – 

He licks his lips. “You taste so good, Slayer,” he says, and his voice is hoarse. “You taste so good, and you should have been mine. Run home. You’re wounded. It would be so easy – run, Slayer. I’ll keep my end of the bargain. But – run.”

And she does. She runs because she’s afraid – not of him. She’s afraid of what could have happened there, in a shadowy garden. She runs, and he chases her, and she knows, even as she puts on more speed and leaves him behind in the empty riverside streets, that it could still happen.

* * *

He chases her because he has to. He’s a demon, and she’s a delicious little mortal and he almost had his teeth in her. The ten steps he runs after her are reflex, that’s all. He doesn’t care that she outruns him; he lets it happen. She’s hurt; she should go home and heal, and he should go home and read. They have a bargain, and they’ll meet again.

He walks all the way back to Fort Greene, untroubled by the scent of human blood, no matter how many drunk or lonely souls he passes. He’s tasted something better.

In his apartment, he opens the book. It all fits together. Everything works. He is a demon and he has a book and a duty to his Slayer and everything makes sense. Barely a smear of blood, sucked from the ragged edges of her skin, but for the first time in a long time, he really does believe he’ll live forever.

* * *

The Lefferets-bound train is waiting in the station; she dives for the closing doors, but he arm hurts and she’s not willing to risk her fingers to the hydraulics. He didn’t follow her down here. She lets it leave without her. 

A moment later, she’s glad – there’s a text from Leah.

**Professor Watcher Lady:** Rey, please come see me as soon as you can.  
  


She texts back:

**Me:** Right now ok?  
  
**Professor Watcher Lady:** Yes. Immediately  
  


The apartment is dark when Leah opens the door. Through the wide windows, she can see the scattered lights of late-night uptown, and the bright, distant cluster of midtown, but they’re all just little pinpoints. The shelves and the couches and the kitchen; everything is in shadow. There’s just one warm yellow light, hung high over the dining table, and Leah points her towards it, saying softly, “Finn and Rose are asleep, I think. Do you want tea?”

Rey shakes her head. “Water, please?” The dry scratchiness of her throat shocks her, and she unthinkingly reaches for the glass Leah holds out with her right hand. 

“You’re hurt,” Leah says, frowning.

“I’ll heal,” Rey says dismissively. She wants to tell Leah what happened, but she doesn’t want Leah to know how stupid she is. Leah wanted to talk to her; they can do that, and Rey can put off seeing how much she’s disappointed her Watcher.

Leah’s frown doesn’t ease, but she seats herself in the little pool of light at the dining table. The dark windows around them make it feel like they’re floating in space. There’s a big book on the table in front of Leah – no, it isn’t a book, it’s a binder. Leah doesn’t open it, just runs her fingers over the edges nervously.

“I was not… thinking clearly around the murder of the archivist of the tunnels. Because I didn’t want to. I’m fortunate that Finn had the patience to talk some sense into me tonight.” She clears her throat. “The archivist was killed at her desk. She didn’t even get up out of her chair. Which means that whoever killed her didn’t surprise her. She knew him, or thought she did.”

“I know who killed her,” Rey blurts. “It was – it was that vampire I saw that first night. That one with the dark hair and the scar.”

Leah stares at Rey for what feels like a very long time. Rey waits for her to demand to know how she knows. She wants her chair to sink into the floor, and save her from having to tell her Watcher what she did. She wants to lie, to deflect is, escape it, but she’s a terrible liar; she never gets away with any lie that matters. They always, always know and she’s always punished. But Leah only swallows hard and opens the binder, which isn’t really a binder at all – it’s a photo album, one of the old-fashioned ones where sticky film holds down the photographs. She peels the film back and holds a photo out to Rey. “Is this what he – what it looked like?”

Rey takes the photo and sucks in her breath. It’s him. Scarface. Without the scar. He’s a clear-faced young man, sitting in a window of some fancy old building, dressed up with a tie and a vest. But it’s him – underneath the vest, he’s even wearing the same fucking gingham shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Yes – that’s – that’s him. He’s got a scar now, on his face and his neck.” And he’s a vampire, which the young man in the photo can’t be – sunlight spills through the window behind him, finding red-brown lights in his waving hair. 

His hooded dark eyes still feel like they go right through her.

Leah reaches out like she wants to take the photo back, but at the last second she closes her hand and just points. “Rey, the vampire you met is Kylo Ren.”

_Oh, shit._

But it all makes sense. How he’s always there – Leah told her he’d know where she lived. How he offered to translate the prophecy for her – Leah and Giles know dozens of languages, of course another Watcher would too. Fuck. “I should have known.”

 _“I_ should have known,” Leah corrects her. “I think I did know. But I didn’t want to admit it, and I didn’t want to talk about it. I told you that – when he was human, he was a Watcher. But – Rey. He wasn’t just – ” She half-reaches for the picture again. “That’s my son,” she whispers, dropping her hand. “Ben.”

Rey stares at her in horror. But Leah isn’t looking at her; she’s looking at the photo in her hands, which she can’t even see, with the way Rey’s holding it up. “I am a Watcher, and my parents were Watchers, and my brother was a Watcher,” she says “And my son was a Watcher, too. And I am the only one left.” Is she crying? She turns out of the light, so Rey can’t tell. “A grand family tradition, my brother used to say. Fighting the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness.” Something twitches in Rey’s memory, but Leah adds bitterly, “Our real tradition is dying. You say he has a scar?”

“Yes,” Rey says. “All the way up his neck and onto his face, just over his eye.”

“It’s horrible, but – that’s a comfort to me, Rey. Because the last time I saw him alive, he didn’t. And vampires don’t scar. So I know he must have fought. While he was still human, still… himself. He failed. But at least he tried. I can be proud of him for that.”

She’s still facing into the dark, so Rey doesn’t say what she’s thinking, which is that she promises she will go down fighting too, she _swears;_ she might be a shitty Slayer in a lot of ways but she can cling to that, to her endless stupid iron will to kick and kick and kick and Leah can be proud of her for that, at least, right? Instead, she says, “That thing you said – about vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness – is that a quote?”

“Yes,” Leah says. “It’s the Watchers’ Prophecy of the Slayer. The oldest mystical text in the world. No one even knows what language it was originally made in.”

“He quoted it to me.” _About me. The only girl in all the world, he said. All alone._

“He was a good Watcher, in so many ways. Which only makes it worse. In so many ways. It makes him so much more dangerous. Of course Dot didn’t get up, didn’t fight him, when he came to the tunnels; he was a good researcher; she wouldn’t have been surprised to see him. She would have thought he was still – ” Leah breaks off. She takes deep breaths, in and out. “They were all too good. Luke and Han and Ben. They could never be cautious. My brother Luke – most Watchers can do a little magic, but Luke _was_ magic. Most people call it having the Sight. He could see the future, resist illusion, tell when people were lying.”

“I didn’t know that was possible,” Rey says, though she probably should have, considering that she’s a dumbass ex-foster kid magically imbued with inhuman strength and speed because supernatural destiny. She makes a mental note to inquire later into the possible reality of fairies, because that might be cool..

“It made him a brilliant Watcher. Luke’s Slayer, Enfys, lived in Buenos Aires, and they kept it _completely_ clean of demonic activity from the time she was called in 1983 until – until she died.” _Right,_ Rey thinks. _She doesn’t want me to know how fast Slayers die. But if Enfys was a teenager in ‘83 she wouldn’t even be sixty now. Young, she died young._ Her heart and stomach feel like they’re full of lead. “Most Watchers who outlive their Slayers retire, but Ben had just turned ten, and it was… quite obvious that he had the Sight too. So Luke didn’t retire; he became a professor at the Watchers Academy in Hampshire, and he took Ben with him.” She looks down at her hands, which are clasped in her lap. “Luke said Ben was the best student the Academy had ever seen. He picked up a First in Classics at Oxford, studied history, magic, religion, fencing, Krav Maga… excelled. He even had friendships. A friend.” Her voice trails away. She takes a long drink of water. “But he was put to the test, and he failed, and now I have to fight a monster who looks like my son.”

“What happened?”

Leah turns the water glass slowly, moving it with two fingers. “It was just before Buffy died, after Wesley got Faith out of jail. The Slayers were planning to close the Hellmouth; word spread. Vampires who previously had been content to mind their own business in various corners of the earth felt the need to come… interfere. Including the Order of Ren.

“Ben and his friend – Tai Kwan – had just taken their oaths as Watchers, and received their assignments. Tai’s was in Southern California. Long Beach. Not far from Sunnydale and the Hellmouth. The Order of Ren is a sort of – society of vampires. They came to kill the potential Slayer he was watching over. She was just a little girl. Ben… had a vision. He convinced Luke, and they went to… well. Ben thought they could help. Stop the Order.”

“They didn’t help?”

“They all died. We found Luke. Tai. The girl. Not Ben.” She presses her fingers together, presses them to her lips. Her eyes are sharp and sad. “I know it’s hard, Rey. When you’re dying. Not to seize on something that seems like it could save you. And I could never blame an ordinary person. But Ben was a Watcher. He was my son. It’s so hard not to be angry with the dead when they’re only dead. That he died – left me – and left this _thing_ to walk with his face and murder with his hands and make everything that was marvelous about my son into something terrible – how can I forgive him, Rey?” Her hands fall to the album in front of her, and she opens it blindly, running her fingers over the picture as if she could read it like that. “But how can I bear not to?”

It’s a little boy who’s in the picture she touches; a little boy with pitcher-handle ears, staring in joyous awe at the massive piece of pizza on his plate. The picture is taken in the mirrored wall of the pizzeria, young and pretty Leah holding the chunky old camera out in front of her, while a tall, handsome man leans over her shoulder with a frown. The flash is a white starburst in her hand. There’s a starburst like that in Rey’s head, the sun over her father’s shoulder as he took her out of her mother’s arms and set her down. White and blinding.

“And he – he killed your husband?”

“Kylo Ren did, yes. Han thought – but Rey?”

“Yes?”

“May I ask you to ask Poe to tell you about this part? He knows more, and it hurts him less. Though he loved Han, too.” She rises. “Everybody did. Help yourself to breakfast from the fridge. I need to try to catch a few hours before my eight o’clock lecture.”

* * *

Finn sleeps lightly, these days; when Rey came into the apartment, he startled awake and lay there, listening. Now, in the silence after she leaves, he lies thinking. He already knew, from Poe, that Kylo Ren had been his hostess’s son before he was sired. He had figured that this narrow bed, where he lies on his side with Rose tucked under his chin, breathing warm and damp against his chest, must have belonged to Ben Szolo, while he was alive. But other things Leah said stick in his mind, and stay there, ticking _(left this_ thing _to walk with his face and murder with his hands)_ , as he breathes in the scent of Rose’s hair and tries to forget what it was like to know the taste of blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot of things have happened in the real world since I last updated, some of them in places where this story takes place. I have been trying to keep this story somewhat lighter than other stories I've done in the past, with fewer footnotes and a tone a little bit more in line with Buffy than with, like, The Wire. I'm going to try to stick to it; there are serious evils discussed in this story, though, and if you feel I'm being tone-deaf, please don't hesitate to let me know. I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/LinearAO3) and [Tumblr](https://linearla.tumblr.com/) if you'd rather have that conversation in a different venue. (I have been on private on Twitter but I will try to stay public so that you can DM me if you want.) And rather than footnote, I will just say as a general overall note for this story that a very good book to read is Matthew Desmond's _Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City._
> 
> Leah's photo of her son is [this one](https://66.media.tumblr.com/ef9a5691197c150df869a8969e99c6fb/3e100c84970273d9-91/s500x750/997f6f66c485268f491b48014101112250ba0c91.jpg).
> 
> Thanks this week to charitable donors [Theghia](https://twitter.com/Theghia1) and [judgyfishnun](https://twitter.com/spinebarrels), in whose honor I've written in cameos from a vampire named Juno and a jumbo slice of Koronet's pizza. Many causes have become vital recipients of charity recently, but unfortunately the need for food and COVID-19 care remains pressing, and I'm very grateful for their donations to these causes. My thanks as always to the gracious [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/Bombastique1)) for reading this chapter; it is not her fault if I ignore her good advice.
> 
> My love to all the streets of NYC, and Church Ave in particular.


	7. These Vamps Ain't Loyal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This week on _In All the World:_**
> 
> “If his sire killed his uncle and his boyfriend? I know Leah likes to talk like the person and the vampire are totally different things, but… they’re not.” In the deepening dark, he takes Rose’s hand, and she looks up at him anxiously. “It feels like… being the worst version of yourself. Wanting the nastiest version of what you want. You don’t stop thinking about what you used to think about; I used to think – ” he breaks off suddenly. “If somebody hurts you like that and the last thought in your head before you’re turned is _I’m gonna kill that guy for this,_ it’s not real surprising that you might wake up and be even more ready to fuck him up.”

Rey goes home. It’s a long ride, with a long time spent pacing on platforms, thinking about Leah and her family. That photograph of her in the mirror with her husband and her son. The white flash before you lose everything.

She tries not to be jealous of Leah’s photo album and her decades of memories, just like she tries not to be jealous of Leah’s beautiful apartment and well-stocked fridge. Rey’s father set her down in front of CPS officers. _No help for it, sweetheart._ Rey doesn’t even know if he was talking to her or her mother. But before that there were things she had, and after that, there weren’t.

In foster care she was one of six or more, depending on the day or the house. They told her her name wasn’t her name, because they read it on a form. They told her that she was an angel or that she was going to hell, that anybody would want her or nobody would, that her parents loved her and that they didn’t love her at all, that they were coming back or that they would be gone forever. Rey went to bed and got up and went to school and came home, did what they told her, only talked back when she couldn’t help it, and never believed a single word they said. There was a white flash in her eyes and white noise in her ears, and they weren’t really talking to her anyway. They were talking to someone they thought she was, and she wasn’t anybody at all. She was just waiting.

She waits on the platform at 59th for the slow, empty train. The showtime dancers practice their backflips among the sleeping passengers, and don’t even bother to hold the hat out towards her where she sits by herself in the back of the car.

 _One girl in all the world,_ said Kylo Ren. _She alone._

* * *

“I thought it was the same as the bandshell!” Rose pleads as they hurry west through the trees. “Why would something called the Concert Grove Music Pavilion _not_ be the same as the bandshell?”

 _“I_ don’t know, but it’s not, is it?” Finn checks his phone again. They’re only kind of late. Sort of late. Twenty minutes late. With no replies to his texts from Rey or Poe.

“They’re not dead, right?” Rose says worriedly. “They wouldn’t be dead.”

“Of course they’re not dead,” Finn retorts, as if he weren’t worried about exactly that. “Rey’s the Slayer. Poe’s got that bat. They’re fine.”

Rey, at least, is fine. Finn catches sight of her among the trees across from the bandshell; she’s wiping sweat and dust out of her eyes as two people with the dazed expressions of first-time witnesses to the supernatural stare at her from the ground. Rose hurries to help them up, and Finn hurries after her.

“That was amazing,” says the kohl-eyed girl he gives his hand to, and then again, past him, to Rey: “That was _amazing._ Thank you so much.”

“I really thought we were dead,” her friend says. They’re both mussed and dirty; Finn thinks the assessment is pretty likely. Did Rey get to them at the last minute? “There were five of them.”

“Five!” Rose cries.

“Poe’s chasing down the last one,” Rey says. “I had my hands full.”

“What _were_ they?”

“Vampires,” Rey says. She sounds tired.

“You _saved our lives,”_ the girl he helped up enthuses.

“Just doing my job.”

“This is your _job?_ Vampire killing?”

“Slaying, technically, but yes.”

“Can we, like, tip you?” the girl asks, pushing back her long black hair. 

“That’s not rude, is it?” her friend asks anxiously. “Or illegal?”

“Why would it be illegal, Ari? It’s not like she works for the government.”

“You don’t know that!”

“You don’t have to tip me,” Rey says. In the distant light of the park lamps, she seems to be blushing. Finn can’t tell if it’s because of the tip or if she thinks her rescues are cute. 

But they do tip her; after many thanks and protestations, the black-haired girl tucks a bill in the cuff of her jeans before her friend pulls her away hissing, _“Oh my God, she’s not a fucking stripper!”_ But they both wave as they stumble away, and Rey unfolds the bill to reveal a twenty.

“Angry Hour drinks at Valhalla on me,” she says, sounding pleased. “I mean, if we finish patrol in time.”

“Save it,” Finn advises. “Security deposit, remember?”

“Right. Shit.” They found a place in Kensington, with one bedroom bigger than the other, so it seems fairer to pay 30-30-30 instead of 25-25-50. They just have to get the money together.

“Once we have a place, we can get a whole bottle of something, and drink it at home.”

“Right.” Rey looks chastened, but also a little surly. Finn is sympathetic. It’s one thing to promise yourself a shot later tonight. Promising yourself a shot sometime in the future, maybe, if you can manage it, does less to get you through the day. Or the night, as the case may be.

Poe saunters out of the bushes with a new tear in his jacket, dust in his hair, and a satisfied look. “Five out of five. Which way we patrolling?”

“Clockwise,” Rey says decisively, and they set out in their usual formation, Rose muttering rhymes and Finn keeping his eye out. He can’t smell the way Rey can (the way he used to be able to), but he knows better than any of them where a vampire would want to lurk, waiting outside of the light for prey. They haul one young vamp from the shadows and stake her without much trouble, but it seems like the nest of five was most of the vampire action in Prospect Park tonight. They’re trailing around the edge of the Botanical Garden, heading for the train at Grand Army Plaza, when Rey asks Poe, “Were you there when Kylo Ren killed Leah’s husband?”

Poe sucks in air. “Yeah. Yeah I was.”

“What happened?” Rey asks, and Finn walks closer. No one here seems to talk about Kylo Ren, and he feels like somebody should.

* * *

“I knew it.” Snoke throws down the sheet of notebook paper with Kylo’s translation on it and leans back in his chair, gloating. “What did I tell you, my boy?”

“You knew, Master,” Kylo says. He keeps his eyes low, his head down. “You were right to bring me here.”

“You told me yourself, of course – though perhaps you don’t remember that? My poor boy; you _do_ get rather shaken sometimes, you know. But even before that, I knew. I knew.” He nods sagaciously, and turns back to the paper. “The beginning is settled, of course. ‘And the Slayer will know him’ – does she know you?”

“Not as well as she will,” he says, looking up with his yellow eyes, his demon’s face, and Snoke smiles darkly, thin lips drawn back over fangs. “Shall I go to her now, Master?”

“No,” Snoke says, frowning. “No, of course not. Our plan for the year has only just begun.”

“But if you don’t need the Starkiller demon – ”

“Kylo, Kylo. Do you think I want the Hellmouth purely for its own sake? We must be positioned to take advantage of circumstances. I think our situation with Mr. Hux will work out very well. And the possibilities for expansion, in this market, are significant. If we bide our time, we can easily have a matchless force by the time we’re ready to call upon the powers of Hell.” Kylo tries to keep his face impassive, but something must show somewhere; Snoke leans over and pats him on the arm. “I know. You’re young, and impatient.”

“I’m _hungry,”_ Kylo snarls, and starts to pace. 

Snoke shoots him an impatient look. “Hunt, then.”

And Kylo goes, and he does mean to hunt, but not on Snoke’s terms. He knows now that he doesn’t have to wait. There’s nothing to wait for.

* * *

“So you know he was sired out in California, right?”

Rey nods. “Leah said he and his uncle were trying to help his friend.”

Poe’s eyebrows jump. “Friend?”

Rey falters. “Tai Kwan?”

“Jesus. Rey, if Tai and Ben were ‘friends’ the dictionary needs some updates. To include more puppy eyes.”

“But Leah said – ” Rey’s stomach turns over a little bit. She doesn’t want Leah to be the kind of mom you can’t tell. “Would Leah not – understand?”

 _“I_ think she would have. But maybe if you spend your whole life at a British boarding school for fighting supernatural evil, you might not be up to date on your mom’s feelings on LGBT rights, y’know? Or maybe it was to protect Tai’s feelings somehow, like he didn’t want to say they were together. I don’t know his culture or whatever. _But,”_ Poe says, and he’s fiddling rapidly at his phone, “I _did_ friend him on Facebook. Y’know, just to be friendly. So check it: guy’s born in Hong Kong, whole life in school in a bog in England, comes to New York for one week only, and _this_ is the only fucking picture he took.”

He brandishes his phone, and Rey takes it from him. It’s a little unnerving to see Kylo’s face unscarred, but so much stranger to see it in the gray sunlight of a cloudy morning. He’s sitting on a bench by the water, in a gray shawl-collared sweater, and holding one of the old blue Greek-key paper coffee cups. _We are happy to serve you._

“Notice anything about that picture?” Poe asks pointedly.

Rey notices the intensity of his dark sideways glance, the elegant curl of his large hand around the blue paper cup. His red, red mouth. “No.”

“It’s on the esplanade, right? But it’s facing _north._ This is Tai’s only picture from his trip to NYC, and he turned his back on the Statue of Liberty to take it.”

Rey thumbs back to Tai’s profile. The picture shows a slender young man in a suit, his shaved head making him look monkish and fragile. From the golden light and the stonework of the room, it might be the reverse view of the picture Leah showed her of her son.

Poe takes the phone back. _“Anyway._ So they get their Watcher assignments, and Tai goes out west, and then Ben goes after him with Luke because vampire cult or whatever. And Luke and Tai keep it together the way Watchers are supposed to, but Ben does, like, the normal human thing and lets himself get made into a vampire.”

“Right.” Rey tries not to be too obvious looking over at Finn. He looks calm, anyway.

“But they don’t know that for sure. All they know is, they don’t have a body. So Leah – I think she couldn’t give up, you know? That he might be kidnapped, but alive. That’s what she wants to be true. Or if she couldn’t believe that, that he was killed, but somewhere else. She doesn’t want to think that Ben got turned, because that means he failed as a Watcher, and her family, their whole _deal_ is being World’s Best Watchers. So she wants to think Ben held out. Did his mind-magic or whatever.”

“Mind-magic?” Rey has the same question, but Finn’s the one who asks.

“Yeah; apparently it’s like, meditation that goes so hard it crosses over to magic? Like basically you think yourself dead.”

“That’s _awful,”_ Rose says.

“I agree, but also, if you don’t, you get Kylo Ren. So I can see both sides here. Anyway, the thing is, Han is _not_ about that Watcher life. He’s with Rose here; he thinks thinking yourself dead is fucked up and his son is not fucked up and so his son is probably a vampire. Han also, it must be said: a lot more street experience than Leia. So Han says his son is vampire… I’m believing him.”

“You went out to kill him?” Rey asks, thinking of the collection of weapons in the back of Poe’s car.

He makes a face. “Not meaning to kill him. Though I was ready to. But Han – see, there’s this spell. This one group of Roma, the Kalderash, came up with it in the nineteenth century; it gives a vampire back their soul. And it’s incredibly hard. Like incredibly hard. Only one witch has ever done it in the past hundred years, and she couldn’t do it for Han because she was busy closing the Hellmouth. But Han sweet-talked her into emailing him the spell, even though he’s basically the laziest, most half-assed witch around, and he packed the Falcon and he bought an Orb of Thessala and he asked me to ride along.”

“In case it didn’t work?”

“I mean, he didn’t say that. He thought the other Ren vampires might try to stop it. So I was going to hold them off while Han cast the spell.”

“But it didn’t work,” Rey says. _Never trust anything without a soul._ She likes to think she’d know the difference, between the dark eyes in the photos and the ones she’s seen so close to hers in the Brooklyn night, but they seem equally piercing, with and without a life and a soul behind them.

“I really thought it had,” Poe says sadly. “Han did everything he said he was going to, and his eyes went black all over, which was kind of freaky at the time, but then there was a little lightshow and his eyes were normal again, so I really thought it’d worked.”

“If his eyes went black,” Rose says anxiously, “like all black? That means he was probably possessed. Sometimes if you’re doing really strong magic, like – the magic itself can take you over. But it can also be a gateway, let… bad things take you over.”

“Yeah.” Poe’s voice is heavy. “I guess that’s what happened. ‘Cause Han got up, and Ben – Kylo, but we thought it was Ben – was there. And he had his vamp face on, which I should have known was a bad sign, but Han was _so sure._ He went up to him, and – I don’t know what he said, but Kylo just reached out and snapped his neck. So. Yeah. I don’t think it worked.”

They walk together in silence for a bit, under the yellow lamplight in the park. The lamps will go off soon, at 1AM, and Rey enjoys the last few moments when they can all still see, before she’s the only one who can see in the dark.

“”If it had worked,” Finn says quietly, “Kylo Ren might have just killed himself.”

“And that would be a problem off our hands,” Poe says harshly. “And Han would be alive.”

Rey can hear Rose take a breath, but before she can tell Poe to have some consideration of Finn’s feelings, Finn says, “They said he’s insane anyway. Phasma – the vampire who sired me, she was called Phasma – she said nobody’s turned a Watcher before and it was almost as bad as trying to turn a Slayer.” 

It’s been sitting in the back of Rey’s head, the cold uneasiness. If Watchers have to train so hard not to be sired, why hasn’t Leah tried to train her? Why doesn’t she have to know how to think herself dead? “What happens when you turn a Slayer?”

“Phasma says it just doesn’t work. Like matter and antimatter. Someone tried it in Japan about three hundred years ago. She killed humans for blood, but she still hunted vampires, and she was twice as strong as a normal Slayer, so it was really not working out for anybody? They lit half of Kyoto on fire trying to take her out but in the end it only worked because she staked herself.”

Poe whistles. “Yeah, that sounds like the kind of mistake you only make once.”

“Phasma said Kylo Ren killed the vampire who sired him. That was part of her evidence that he was nuts. But from what you say, it’s not so surprising.”

“Why not?”

“If his sire killed his uncle and his boyfriend? I know Leah likes to talk like the person and the vampire are totally different things, but… they’re not.” In the deepening dark, he takes Rose’s hand, and she looks up at him anxiously. “It feels like… being the worst version of yourself. Wanting the nastiest version of what you want. You don’t stop thinking about what you used to think about; I used to think – ” he breaks off suddenly. “If somebody hurts you like that and the last thought in your head before you’re turned is _I’m gonna kill that guy for this,_ it’s not real surprising that you might wake up and be even more ready to fuck him up.”

“Was it just that, that made them think he was insane?” He hadn’t seemed insane to her. But she doesn’t really know what insanity looks like in a vampire.

“No. He used to talk nonsense sometimes, just sit there and say random shit.”

“Oh, he always did that,” Poe says. “I mean, like, not all the time. But it was known to happen. He had visions and shit.”

“Huh. Well, the other thing was that he would fight you for like, nothing. I mean, everybody fights; everybody’s always clawing to be top of the demon heap and everybody’s always stabbing each other in the back. That’s just how vampires are.”

“Right.” Rey thinks bitterly about Pryde. Slayer healing is good, but her arm still hurts, and it was all so Kylo Ren could smoke a rival.

“But this was not a these-vamps-ain’t-loyal thing. Like he would just be standing there, and then you’d say something random, and he’d fucking lose it. Or you’d find him and he’d just be pacing around and screaming. The first time Rose tried to come save me, he absolutely blew up. Threw me across the fucking room and wrecked a bunch of shit.”

They’re almost out of the park. Rose puts both her arms around Finn as they walk. “If he threw you at Faith ‘cause he hated you, then I’m glad he hated you. Was he scared of you, do you think?”

“Maybe. Snoke said I had promise.” He turns his face away. “I’m not proud of that. I’m not proud of much.”

“Brains are brains,” Rose says. “You’re a smart man, and you were a smart vampire. And they’re your brains either way, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Finn says, and his face is troubled. “I think I was me, either way.”

“I don’t think you were you,” Rose says. “Not really you. You were dead, and there was a demon using your body and your brain, is all.”

“I remember it all,” Finn says, but then they step out onto the sidewalk, with the bigger, brighter, higher lights, and the white glare of traffic in their eyes, and he doesn’t say anything else. Rey turns back to the park and sniffs the air one last time, but there’s no trace of the scent of demon anywhere.

* * *

Kylo waits for her where he waited for her that first night, in the shadow of her stairs. She’s a long time coming back; she’s a dutiful Slayer. While he waits, he imagines different things he could say to her. _Come with me, Slayer. There’s something I need to tell you, Slayer. I made you a promise, Slayer. Rey. Let me keep my word._

When she appears, her steps are slow and trudging. He traces the speed of them, timing it so that he’ll step out just as she walks by. But she stops dead in front of him. “Kylo Ren.”

Of course she’d improve. Every day she’s faster, stronger. Every day she’s a better hunter. She can see him where he stands now, and probably smelled him when she was halfway down the block. But he steps out of the shadows anyway. He needs her to see him.

“You’re Kylo Ren.”

He frowns. “You didn’t know? She didn’t tell you?” Then he puts it together. “You didn’t tell her, did you. That you’d seen me. That you’d made a bargain with me.” Under the streetlight, Rey’s blush is half shadow, all temptation to him. “You should tell your Watcher everything, Rey.” He steps closer. “But I’m glad you didn’t. She’s not really your Watcher. You know that, don’t you?”

“You killed your father,” she says, like he hasn’t spoken. 

It slices up through him. Everything that happened, and his dream, too. He rocks on his feet like a subway rider, but he won’t let it show on his face. “Yes.”

“He tried to give you back your soul, and you killed him.”

“You say it like he did me a favor,” he snarls. “He tried to curse me.”

“A soul isn’t a curse.”

“Yes it is. The Kalderash made that curse to make Angelus suffer.”

“Who’s Angelus? Why would it make him suffer?”

She doesn’t know anything. No one’s told her anything. No one but him has done their duty by her. “You think a demon wants to share space with a soul? He was trying to curse me, trying to torture me; Luke was dead and he wanted revenge.”

“He loved you,” she insists. Her eyes are burning. “He wanted you back.”

 _“Back,”_ he snarls, “none of them wanted me _back.”_ He takes another step closer. “No hope of honor or forgiveness. Not for me. Don’t you _know?”_ They must have told her what he did, how he failed, the oaths he broke, but she’s just staring at him, and he takes another step towards her, full of rage at everything she doesn’t understand, and she holds up her arm, reflexively, and winces. She’s hurt. She’s still hurt.

He turns away. Snoke told him to wait. There are reasons to wait. He can wait. Let her heal. He’ll do it another time, some time when she isn’t hurt. Some time when it won’t hurt him to hurt her. The night wind carries the smell of her to him, and he’s sick with hunger and longing, but the pain is worse, and he walks away and goes on walking. _“Kylo Ren,”_ she calls behind him, angry, but as hollow as he is, he doesn’t answer to his hollow name.

“I’ll be back for you,” he says as he walks away, and he knows she hears him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next week on _In All the World:_**
> 
> "But is there a spell," Rey presses. Every night she goes out and fights off the worst things the supernatural has to offer. Isn't it time the supernatural did her a solid for once in its everlasting life? Rose squirms, grimacing, and Rey says, "Just to find them. Find where they are. That's all."
> 
> * * *
> 
> Thanks to the gracious [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/Bombastique1)) for reading this chapter; my faults as always are my own. This week's charitable donors, as the charitable rescuees who tip Rey, are [villainouschild](https://twitter.com/villainouschild) and [midwinterspring](https://archiveofourown.org/users/midwinterspring/works) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/midwintersprin1)). This week's Ben Szolo picture (with way less embarrassing facial hair!) is [this one](https://66.media.tumblr.com/9ba255eb0e90649709e1b4df8d7ff99a/3e100c84970273d9-35/s500x750/4b54b1a9fd9c110b4ad6f470a2cdcb5ff15ca47c.jpg). I apologize for the short chapter this week; I meant it to have more in it, but it's a difficult time in my household right now.


	8. The F Never Comes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> “You smell so fucking good,” he mutters as he pulls her back to him. “Just let me – for a minute.” 
> 
> He takes another deep breath, and she mirrors him without meaning to. Her lungs fill with the scent of him and she has to face what she's been breathing through her mouth to try to ignore – he smells good too. Incense, warm wool, pine resin; sweet holy things that would keep her safe, all shot through with the dark, filthy crackle of _demon._ It hooks her somewhere deep in the gut and pulls. She feels desperate and bewildered and burning hot. 
> 
> “Why do we smell so good to each other?” she murmurs. 
> 
> He leans in even closer. His nose presses into her hair; she can feel his lips brush her ear. “Because we're made to hunt each other down,” he says, and kisses her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am sorry for the delay. I'm afraid these are hard times. The tags have been updated. Content warning this week for genre horror, electrocution, and references to drug overdoses.

When Kylo does come back, something is wrong. Her smell is very faint, which makes him uneasy. He looks up to the window which he knows is hers, and realizes that he can’t see the tall cone of her standing lamp. He’s stayed on the sidewalk before, waiting to see it turn on after she comes home for the night, wondering what she does in its light, the smell of her sweat and her frustration lingering in his nose. But the lamp is gone.

She’s gone. She’s moved away.

He jumps to the fire escape without difficulty, moving soundlessly up the rusty steps. She would have sniffed him out, if he’d done this while she lived here, and threshold magic would have prevented him from doing what he does now, which is to force the window and climb inside. She’s gone now; he doesn’t need human invitation to come in.

A single, narrow room, without a kitchen. There are unsavory dark patches on the plaster ceiling, the paint on the radiator is cracked and peeling, and the frame around the bathroom door is crooked. It’s empty, and ugly, but it still smells like her, so he stays for a while, walking up and down, breathing her in. He imagines her sleeping here, dreaming a Slayer’s dreams of things that have happened and will happen. Dreams like his.

She’s gone, but she’s not lost. He can trust the Sight that far. This is their city, his and hers, and his dreams will bring her back to him.

* * *

The apartment in Kensington is pretty nice, in Finn’s opinion. The landlord lets them move in a few days early, and Rey can haul all their IKEA and Freecycle up the stairs single-handed. They’re on the third floor, sandwiched between a couple from Dhaka who have three young sons and a Yorkie, and a trio of Chinese-American roommates who have acoustic folk music concerts in their living room on Saturday nights. (Rose finds all this out within twenty minutes of them getting the keys, because Rose is Rose.) The first floor is a dilapidated restaurant with a torn, sun-bleached vinyl awning; they pour cooking oil into the gutter, leaving splatters of it to congeal rancid on their doorstep, but hey – having your appetite ruined is good for the budget. Finn goes out of his way to avoid walking down Flatbush, where that one place tempts him with the extra-hot jerk chicken. In his past life (that’s how he thinks of it; that’s how it feels) he was just a normal-amount fond of hot sauce. Now he craves it, and wants it as hot as he can stand it, glopping sriracha and habanero sauce onto everything, because it makes him gasp for air and reminds him that he’s a breather again. It tastes so strong. It tastes nothing like blood.

He and Rose don’t have a lot to pack up and take from Leah’s place, but Leah hugs them and makes them take a bottle of wine and the books they’d each been reading, and two more that she thinks they might find interesting. It’s nice, and it gives Finn the push he needs to linger outside the building with her as Rose dumps their stuff into the Falcon’s trunk.

“Could I... come back and see you sometime?” he asks, uncertainly.

“Of course,” Leah says easily, but he can tell she’s surprised. She’s been kind, and she wanted to be welcoming, he knows, but there’ve been too many awkward moments full of too many unspoken thoughts. Her son is a semi-psychic ultra-educated third-generation Watcher who was kidnapped by a vampire cult. He’s a rando with a Language & Culture BA from Cal State Northridge who was snagged by a race-based vamping policy. Only one of them was rescued.

Finn sets his shoulders. “Poe said that there was a trick Watchers have. To keep from being sired.” She gives him a wary look. “To die instead of being sired.”

Leah nods slowly. “Yes.”

“Can you teach me?” She still looks wary. “Please. I’ve been there once. I don’t want to go back.”

A mail truck tries to make its way down the narrow street around the Falcon, and can’t. The driver honks, and Poe honks back. Leah looks away to the commotion, and then back at Finn. “I understand. Yes. Text me when you’d like to come by.”

* * *

Bunsen’s done something to offend Petri, and Rey and Rose have to retreat to opposite sides of the sidewalk to pull the growling little doofs apart as they strain at their collars. Beaker shows them a face of martyred responsibility, and Rey scratches behind his ears while she scoops Bunsen up under her other arm. Her paws paddle futilely in the air as she tries to process her change in elevation, head whipping back and forth in confusion. “Bunsen,” Rey sighs, “I don’t say this lightly, but you are literally _such_ a dumb bitch.”

Rose is more patient; she squats on the pavement to soothe Petri with treats until he forgets about the blood feud he was just prepared to start. When canine hostility levels are down, she rejoins Rey, frowning as she picks the conversation back up. “What do you mean, they got your name wrong?”

“They literally got me mixed up with another Rachel. And they put her name on all my documents and shit so all my teachers really thought that was my government name and I just had issues. So there were five years when my parents wouldn’t have been able to find me, because my name was wrong on all my paperwork. It didn’t get fixed until the actual Rachel Palatine got adopted by her grandpa and my foster dad had to admit that _maybe_ I knew my own name better than he did.”

“That’s _awful,”_ Rose says. Rose’s parents were there for most of her life; she’d met Finn at a YMCA support group for orphaned young adults. She’s looking at Rey with damp, pitying eyes, and Rey puts on her best high-functioning well-adjusted ironic smile so she doesn’t growl and bite like Bunsen. Bunsen is a dumb bitch and Rey is a smart human who does not attack kind, sympathetic people. Anymore.

“Anyway, so I thought, if they can’t find me, maybe I should make myself easier to find. My mother always had this stack of glossy magazines by her bed, and I thought, well, I should get into the glossy magazines, then. Obviously I wasn’t going to be a movie star or a model or anything, but I won an essay prize when I was in middle school, and I thought maybe I could be a journalist.” She looks down at the sidewalk, where twelve paws scurry and stumble, and reminds herself that it is kind of funny, and snorts. “Anyway, that’s how I ended up with a degree I couldn’t monetize for shit beyond a content farm.”

“So you did it for your parents? _You_ didn’t want to be a journalist?”

“I mean, it’s not like anybody made me do it. I just got an idea in my head and stuck with it. I’m kind of stubborn sometimes.”

“Ya think?” Rose asks, so dryly that Rey looks up, startled, and then quickly away.

“I just mean, it’s not like I’ve put some dream of Buzzfeed glory on hold for slaying,” she says hastily. “I can pitch some listicles if I come up short for rent, is all.”

“You got Wesley’s pension, though, right?”

“Yeah. And I am _super_ grateful, believe me. But also a thousand a month before taxes isn’t exactly going to cut it.”

“Petri, _no!”_ Rose cries, as the dog lunges for the Nuts4Nuts vendor and tries to lick his knees. “I’m _so_ sorry, sir – Petri, come _on!”_

They hurry down the sidewalk, and Rey casts a longing look over her shoulder at the honey-roasted pecans, which is a mistake, because Beaker decides he needs to see what the fuss is all about and that the best route to knowledge is between Rey’s legs. Rey trips, catches herself on her newly-healed right arm, and unthinkingly does a handspring to clear her legs of the entangling leashes. A man across the street whistles, and Rose gives him a stony look.

“I wish I knew a spell to make these animals less moronic,” Rose sighs.

Rey lifts Beaker to eye level. “Who’s a heckin’ stupid doggo, hmm? Who’s a smol pupper with no brains at all?” She gets a confused, off-center nose-lick as an answer, and almost drops him as an idea suddenly occurs to her. “Rose. Is there a spell for finding people?”

“I mean, kind of? There really aren’t many circumstances where it makes sense to use it, so it might as well not exist. Either it’s more trouble than it’s worth and you should just wait for them to text back, or it’s too dangerous and you should just wait for them to text back or the hospital to call.”

“Could it find my parents, though?” Hope and elation bubble up through her, mixed with fear, like finding a too-good job listing or a too-cheap rental offer. All this time, all those years – this could be her chance; this could be the moment she’s lucky the way other people get lucky.

Rose makes a worried, doubtful face. “Can’t you reach out through social services or something? That might be a better option than the spell; it’s really complicated, and – ”

"But is there a spell," Rey presses. Every night she goes out and fights off the worst things the supernatural has to offer. Isn't it time the supernatural did her a solid for once in its everlasting life? Rose squirms, grimacing and toying with Petri’s leash, and Rey says, "Just to find them. Find where they are. That's all."

“I mean, yeah, there’s a spell. But Rey, if something goes wrong and we can’t find them.... bad things could happen.”

“Goes wrong how? And what kind of bad things?”

“If the person you’re searching for isn’t on the mortal plane anymore, if something’s happened to them, the spell creates a fissure that a demon can come through.”

Rey _pff_ s between her teeth. “A, they can’t be older than like, 55 now, and B, there is literally nobody on earth more qualified to deal with a demon than me.”

“But – shouldn’t we wait, at least? Tonight is Halloween; won’t you be busy?”

“Nah; Leah says vamps hate Halloween. Too many people on the streets, no chance to eat in private.” She bounces onto her toes. “What do you need for it? We can stop at Westside Market.”

She wonders briefly if she should stop by and mention it to Leah, but she’s pretty sure she’s teaching right now, and also, what’s to mention? Slayers are supposed to have parents. She’s just getting closer to being a good Slayer.

* * *

Kylo does dream. He takes his daytime seat at the back of the R and lets it rock him unconscious. The first day, he dreams of one of Uncle Luke’s lectures at the Academy. _You will fail. Every Watcher fails, because every Slayer dies. But if you are alert and diligent and dutiful, you will have years with her. And if you are lucky, you will kill the thing that kills her._ Tears rolling from his blue eyes into his beard. He dreams of the stake through his sire’s heart; his smirk dissolving to dust. _This is my oath as a Watcher: to give evil no quarter nor refuge –_ He jerks awake, snarling, with a terrible ache in his chest.

The second day, he regrets sleeping in public. He dreams of Tai in the sauna, the towel low on his narrow hips, his hands in Ben’s hair. He dreams of Rey, pinning him to the wall with her shoulder, and her breath is hot on his neck as she smirks, _You think I ought to be yours? You don’t deserve me._ In the dream, he has breath, too, and a heartbeat that speeds when she puts her little hands against his chest and strokes down and down, until he wakes up at Canal, with no choice but to grit his teeth and wait out the hard-on in his pants.

These aren’t useful dreams; they’re just a cruel mixture of memory and desire, useless fragments scratching around in his dust-filled brain. But the third day he gets what he waited for. It takes him a long time to sleep, and at first it’s just the same humid longing as the day before: her beautiful, hostile mouth on his, his face smothered in her hot little cunt as her thighs tighten around his ears. But then it changes; she’s on a Brooklyn corner, her sword flashing under the streetlights. _The hunter’s here,_ she says, looking straight at him, and he sees the street sign green and white over her shoulder.

Church Avenue.

* * *

Rey can hardly breathe, she’s so impatient. Her heart is inventing a new sub-genre of EDM with a heavy thrashcore influence. Finn gives their set-up – a cairn of cloves on a plate, a bowl of rosewater, a circle of candles around Rey’s laptop – a dubious look as he settles himself on the couch with the fire extinguisher across his knees, but Rey ignores his lack of enthusiasm, just like she ignores the troubled look that keeps passing over Rose’s face.

“It’s midnight,” Rey announces, trying to sound – well, she knows she doesn’t sound casual. Trying to sound like she hasn’t been waiting for the seconds to turn over.

“You have something they’ve touched?” Rose asks, and Rey produces it – the slack figure-8 of elastic with the pink plastic balls. One of three her mother used to do her hair with sometimes, and which her father always used to tweak. “And you don’t mind my magicking your laptop so the spell can use Google Maps? If something goes wrong… the demon is going to come through your computer.”

Rey rolls her eyes and leans over the weapons chest. She pulls out her sword and brandishes it vaguely in the laptop’s direction. “Look. I’m ready for the demon. Worst case scenario: prepared for. _Please,_ Rose.”

“Fine,” Rose sighs, and Finn’s frown deepens. Rey ignores them both and kneels down in front of the laptop. Her heart is going so fast. They’ve been gone so long. When she finds them, she’ll – when she finds them, they’ll – 

_“Kelidanon,”_ Rose says, lighting the candles. _“Kelidanon, we are searching as you search.”_ She uses one of the candles to light the cloves; they burn sweet and smokey. _“Kelidanon, assist us.”_ She pours the burning cloves into the rosewater, then holds the bowl out to Rey.

With trembling fingers, Rey holds the elastic above the bowl. Her voice cracks. “Sarah Jacobs. Michael Jacobs.”

 _“Kelidanon, search with us! Find them in this world!”_ Rose cries, and pushes Rey’s hand into the bowl.

The candles go out. The lights go out. Rey’s laptop screen glows bright, the digitized map flying by too quickly for the human eye to parse. Then it stops. New York City. _Are they here? Were they here all this time?_ It narrows in. Brooklyn. Southeast of Prospect. Church Avenue.

“Oh no,” Rose says. Her voice is full of dread.

The screen goes white. White light pours out of the laptop in a cloud, growing and growing, and Rose screams, _“Oh no, oh no!”_ Rey slashes her sword through the cloud but nothing happens; it swirls and re-forms and keeps growing. It darkens, and then, with a roar, it solidifies.

Every demon Rey’s fought before has been roughly human-sized or smaller. Not this one. This one is six feet high at the shoulder and looks for a moment in the darkness like a horse, with its long neck and long back and long nose. Then it lunges towards her, and Rey sees that it’s hairless and eyeless, six-legged and spidery, and it hisses at her, baring a mouth of jagged fangs. She slices her sword up towards its face, and it rears back and lashes out; six-inch claws whistle past Rey’s ears as she dodges. Rose’s scream trails into a paralyzed whimper, and the neighbor’s Yorkie begins to yap furiously.

Her hands are sweating on the sword. It’s huge. Claws and teeth. It means her parents are dead. She can’t possibly fight it in here. There’s no room. 

Her parents are dead.

She keeps slashing at it, not committing enough to the blows to put herself in its reach for long, and circles towards the door. She has to keep it focused on her. Make it chase her. Finn understands; he’s pushing Rose out of the room, keeping her behind him as he backs away into the tiny shelter offered by the kitchenette. Rey throws open the door and makes a real lunge, aiming to wound and to kill if she can. Her blade makes contact, and she’s satisfied by the thin inhuman shriek of pain she hears behind her as she plunges down the stairs. She dives shoulder-first through the building door, leaps the step, and crashes straight into Kylo Ren.

His name is all she has time to think before the demon’s claws are reaching for her again; she shoves Kylo to her left and vaults to her right, holding the sword in both hands. It’s not a vampire; she has no idea where its heart is. She’s going to have to behead it, but it’s got a neck like a fucking pine tree.

“Did you summon a fucking _Kelidanon demon?”_ Kylo roars, springing to his feet.

“Shut the fuck up!” she shouts. “I fucking don’t have fucking time for you!”

 _ **Foolish little children,**_ a sibilant voice says in her head, and she almost drops the sword. Kylo clamps his hands around his skull like it hurts him. _**I am Kelidanon. The searcher. The swallower.**_ The demon thrusts its head at her, and licks its teeth. She thrusts the sword straight upwards, stabbing at its skull; the blade goes in an inch, no more.

She pulls the sword out, ready to try again, when Kylo grabs her by the arm. “Run,” he growls through the fangs of his demon face, and drags her onto the avenue. _“Out of the way,”_ he shouts at the little collection of pedestrians on the sidewalk, young people hanging on one another’s arms. For a moment, they stare, petrified, at the demon-faced man and the girl with the sword and the monstrous beast coming around the corner after them, and then they break into awed smiles, clapping and whistling, and Rey remembers that it’s fucking Halloween. One girl has a Baby Shark costume. She tries not to laugh hysterically as she and Kylo pelt down the sidewalk towards McDonald with the beast hot on their trails. He leaps down the stairs to the subway, and she leaps after him.

Their running footsteps echo in the tiled mezzanine, and the demon’s voice echos in her head. _**Foolish, foolish. Tasty little souls. Run and hide.**_ Kylo jumps the turnstile, and she follows him; as the station attendant’s bored voice starts to reprimand them over the speaker, he throws himself over the edge of the platform and onto the tracks, pulling her with him.

“What are you doing?” she cries, but she follows him as he charges into the darkness of the tunnel. 

“Kelidanon demons are soul-swallowers,” he says in a low voice, as he runs a weaving path among the huge iron girders that separate the tracks for the G and the F. “If you let it touch you, anywhere, _at all,_ it will suck out your soul and eat it. What were you thinking?”

 _ **Sarah Jacobs,**_ the voice in her head says, mocking. _**Michael Jacobs. Gone, little children; all gone.**_

“Your _parents?”_ he says incredulously, and if she weren’t running for her life in a dank tunnel, she’d bash his head into the wall.

Instead, she asks, “And why are we in the fucking subway tunnel?”

“Hiding,” he says, but in the darkness she sees him urgently jabbing his finger at the ground. The tracks? Will it get tangled up? Why can’t he just say?

 _ **No hiding,**_ the voice says in her head. _**Which shall I eat first? The one that is hard and sweet? Or the one that is dirty and soft? I need no eyes to smell your souls.**_

“Whatever you want, come and get,” Kylo spits, and leaps sideways in the dark, jumping over the – _oh._ Over the third rail.

She jumps after him, and the demon springs. A terrible sound splits the air and a terrible white light splits the darkness; the creature writhes, its hairless flesh frying, its legs curling beneath it, and Kylo shouts, “The _second_ it gets away from the rail, cut off its head, and _don’t let it touch you!”_

Rey lifts her sword in both hands and fixes her eyes on the furious demon. It ought to be dead, but it isn’t; only its back legs are glued to the rail, and it’s trying to fight its way free of the current which torments it. With a hoarse scream, it drags itself free, and Rey ducks as it flings its head towards her, saliva foaming around clenched teeth. She brings the sword down on its neck with all her might, and it slices through with a sick crunch. Before the head hits the ground, head and body both dissolve into a cloud of dim white light.

 _“Shit,”_ she breathes, and Kylo points at the signal lights.

 _“Shit_ is right,” he says. His face is human again, and furiously dismayed. “The fucking trains are coming. Both of them.”

“Both of them? The F never comes! Since when does the F _ever_ fucking come?”

“Now,” he says, and yes, the general din of a four-track subway is starting to have a very specific sound. The ground rumbles beneath their feet. And they’ve gone so far into the tunnel they’re halfway to Ditmas. Fuck. His hand closes around her wrist, and he runs, and she runs with him.

The trains are loud behind them, and she can see her own shadow by their lights, getting brighter and brighter as she runs. Slayer and vampires can move faster than any human being, but not as fast as a train making up time between stations. When he drags her into the alcove of a pump room she doesn’t remember passing, she’s briefly blinded by the glare of the F train’s lamps and deafened by its angry horn, and everything shakes as the two metal giants roar past them. The liquid silver of the speeding trains is inches away from where they huddle, pressed together in front of a battered door. Her chest heaves with the exertion of running and fighting and running again. She feels him gasp, too, as if he needed to breathe. He’s smelling her, she realizes. She tries to lean away, after the train passes them, slowing on its way to the station, but he doesn’t let her.

“You smell so fucking good,” he mutters as he pulls her back to him. “Just let me – for a minute.” 

He takes another deep breath, and she mirrors him without meaning to. Her lungs fill with the scent of him and she has to face what she's been breathing through her mouth to try to ignore – he smells good too. Incense, warm wool, pine resin; sweet holy things that would keep her safe, all shot through with the dark, filthy crackle of _demon._ It hooks her somewhere deep in the gut and pulls. She feels desperate and bewildered and burning hot. 

“Why do we smell so good to each other?” she murmurs. 

He leans in even closer. His nose presses into her hair; she can feel his lips brush her ear. “Because we're made to hunt each other down,” he says, and kisses her.

His hand is still clamped around her wrist, and he pins it to the wall above her head, her sword ringing against the cement as his mouth crushes hers. His other hand climbs to her neck, and she thinks he’ll clamp it down, hold her by the throat – but he cups the nape of her neck, and his thumb caresses the line of her jaw as his kiss turns slow and savoring. Her fingers dig into the soft gingham of his shirtfront, trying to pull him even closer. She wants more, and more, and then something clicks in her head, something she hadn’t processed in the running and the fighting and the running again.

 _Your souls,_ the demon had said. Plural. 

She shoves him away. How did she let him touch her? He’s a vampire. He’s worse than that.

“You have a soul,” she says, staring. “The spell worked. Your father’s spell.”

“Nothing my father did ever worked,” he snarls, but he’s backing away from her, retreating like a spooked animal.

“No. It worked. It worked, and _you killed him anyway._ You’re worse than all the rest. Because you have a soul. You ought to know better. You had a chance to be better, and you chose to be a killer instead.” Her parents are dead, and his father gave everything to try to save him, and he threw it away. “Didn’t you _love_ him? Didn’t you _care?_ What kind of – ”

“Monster?” He shifts his face with a crunch of bone, eyes flashing yellow and fangs bared where he’s huddled on the far side of the doorway. “What kind do you think? A soul never kept anybody from being a monster.”

“He got yours back! He wanted you back!”

“He wanted me to _suffer._ To pay for how badly I hurt all of them, how I failed you.”

_“Me?”_

“She was never supposed to be your Watcher. She was retired. The Watchers Council asked her to come back because I – and they thought you’d never be called. But I knew. Potential Slayer 576, New York Metropolitan Area, Rachel Jacobs. You were assigned to _me.”_ He steps towards her again, and his face slips back into human shape, twisted with fury and shame. “You were my Slayer, Rey. You should have been _mine.”_

She’s the one who kisses him this time. She drags him down to her mouth with her fingers in his soft hair, and she bites his lips until he opens his mouth to moan and then she presses her tongue into his mouth. He seizes her around the waist and hoists her to his hip before throws his back so hard against the door that it breaks. He stumbles into the pump room, pulling her with him, and she goes on kissing him. Her sword clatters on the concrete floor. She knows who he is and what he’s done and she kisses him anyway.

It’s everything her frustrating rounds of porn and masturbation never give her. The smell of him fills her nose, and he smells so good. His hands press hard against her flesh, dangerously strong as they clamp around her ribs and tear her off his mouth, flipping her around so her back is to his front. He holds her with both arms, crushed against his chest like someone might take her away from him. There’s a wet sound beside her ear as he licks his lips, and she squirms in his arms.

“Oh, you need it bad, don’t you.” It’s not a question. She can feel the rumble of his words through his chest; the rage and desire in his voice resonate in her body. “Don’t worry. I can take care of you.” He holds her even tighter, his lips pressed to the skin beneath her ear, his cock pressed against her ass, and his groan makes her whole body hum. “Fuck. You don’t know. You don’t even know. Fuck me, Slayer. Give me my moment of bliss. Give me that wet little cunt.”

She slams her elbow into the side of his head and he drops her. But she’s not done with him; she stomps the inside of his foot and shoves, and he goes down. Before he can push himself up, she’s on him, straddling his chest, putting all her weight on him, grinding down. “The fuck you think you know about my cunt, huh?”

His hands clutch hard at her hips; he could throw her off, but he pulls her down harder, rocking her against him to the rhythm of the water pumps that churn around them. “I can smell it,” he says between his teeth. “Fucking dripping.”

“Yeah?” she asks, and leans back, shifting her hips so she can run her fingers down the seam of her jeans. She’s teasing herself, torturing herself, but it’s worth it for the way his eyes follow her hand, for the way he shudders beneath her when she undoes the button and pulls down the zipper. “You think I’m wet for you? You think I should fuck you?”

“You need it,” he snarls. “Need it so bad you’d take it from a monster.”

She unzips her boots and yanks her jeans off. He huffs, and she spares a glance for his cock, the thick bulge straining at his pants. 

“No,” she says coldly. She plants her knees on either side of his head. “You’re right. I need to get off. But monsters don’t get to get fucked.” He makes a sound like pain, and then his mouth is on her.

It's a relief; it's such a relief. She did need this. The cool touch of his soft tongue in the hot room. The firm press of his nose against her clit and the frantic, famished sounds he makes as he rubs his mouth on her. The bitter satisfaction of finding someone worse than her, someone she can use and use; the water pumps thunder around them and her blood thunders in her ears as she grinds down harder on his face, because she wants to and he doesn’t need to breathe.

One of his heavy hands comes up and slides over the curve of her ass, up under her shirt until he finds her breast and swallows it with his palm. _Fuck,_ his hands are big. She grinds down again, whimpering, and hears his belt buckle jingle. The urge to look is overwhelming, and she can tell he wanted her to look; when she turns her head over her shoulder, the hand on her breast tightens and he groans and chokes beneath her.

All right, so it’s a good-looking cock. All right, so her mouth waters a little as she watches him work it desperately up and down. Does he think he can get what he wants out of her? Think he can tempt her to slide down his long body and ride? She’s strung tight between his hand on her breast and his mouth on her cunt, and she’s not going to give him what he wants. “Fine,” she snarls down at him, and he stares up at her, eyes wild and transfixed. “Get off to this. Get off to being used. I don’t care what you do. You’re a monster. You’re the fucking worst, and you hurt everyone who ever loved you, but you can’t hurt me. You’re going to make me come, you understand? Now do it. _Fuck.”_ Her hips buck as he seals his soft lips around her and sucks, and she feels herself clenching, close to the edge of control. “Fuck. Yes. Like that. Just like that. _Fuck.”_

The spasms that grip her shake her so hard she might break his nose, but it feels so good. The best thing she’s had in weeks. Months. Her whole fucking life – all those times she’s had to hold back and wait and settle and be thankful for what she got – not now. Now she gets what she wants, and it’s the best thing she’s ever had.

She pulls herself off him; he whimpers like he doesn’t want her to move. His face is shining wet in the dim light, and he sucks his lips into his mouth and groans as his head falls back. He catches most of it with his hand, but the last milking squeeze he gives himself sends a little runnel rolling down his wrist. She turns away, reaching for her pants, when a hand snaps closed around her ankle and drags her back. He’s sitting up; he pins her leg against his shoulder with the hand that grabbed her, and with the other he paints a slow, wet line down the length of her inner thigh.

She kicks him back to the ground. “You’re disgusting,” she spits.

He looks up at her with dark, serious eyes as she wincingly tries to clean off the mess he’s made before she pulls her jeans back on. “Why did you summon that demon, Rey?”

“It was a spell that went wrong. A spell for searching. I wanted to find my parents,” she says, jamming her feet back in her boots, not looking at him. “We got – separated. And then my foster got my name wrong, so they had no way to find me.”

“They were already dead by then.”

“What – what are you talking about?” How would he know? Were they killed by vampires? Is that why she’s a Slayer?

“They OD’d six months after they handed you over to CPS. Your case worker told you. They told you again when you turned 18. It’s on all your paperwork.”

“What are you talking about? No it isn’t.”

“It is. They gave me your file.” He rises to his feet and stalks towards her until she has to turn up her head to see his face. His eyes are as empty of pity as Rose’s were full. “Social workers told you. Foster parents told you. You could have looked it up any time.” His hand is on her leg, retracing the line he drew. “But you only believed it when a demon told you.”

She punches him in the gut. Follows it up with a roundhouse kick. He falls back, and she lunges for her sword. “I can’t believe I let you touch me,” she hisses.

“I know,” he says. “You don’t like to believe ugly things. Why do you think I marked you?”

Her sword slices through the air where his head had been. She hears his feet hit the ties of the tracks. But she doesn’t move from where she stands until the F train manages another appearance. Then she climbs down from the pump room, and follows the orange glow of its badge to the lights of Church station.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> She hesitates first; he corners her against the ladder of the slide, and her mouth is as warm as he remembers. She tastes like Oreos and halal-cart hot sauce and everything good that’s been taken away from him. He holds her head in both his hands, tangling his fingers in her hair to learn its texture, tilting her face to learn the angle of her chin.
> 
> “What did you kill tonight, to make you this desperate?” he asks her, kissing the corner of her jaw. Her mouth opens a little further, nearly making the hungry sound he knows she wants to make. He wants to eat that sound, squeeze it out of her and swallow it down.
> 
> “Not desperate enough to fuck you,” she says. But she came when he called her.
> 
> * * *
> 
> It takes SO MANY fucking water pumps to keep the subway running. The F train was, statistically, the worst fucking train in the system for many many years. That was before the L went to repair-related hell, though, and let's be real: the C and the 6 are also pretty shit.
> 
> My thanks as ever to [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/Bombastique1)) for reading through, and also for describing this chapter as "sordid," which label I embrace with pride. If you sent me a receipt for a cameo and have not yet appeared, please let me know; I think I got everybody but also I lost the list I made, so it is also possible I have fucked it up.


	9. Guess I'll Die

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> She hesitates first; he corners her against the ladder of the slide, and her mouth is as warm as he remembers. She tastes like Oreos and halal-cart hot sauce and everything good that’s been taken away from him. He holds her head in both his hands, tangling his fingers in her hair to learn its texture, tilting her face to learn the angle of her chin.
> 
> “What did you kill tonight, to make you this desperate?” he asks her, kissing the corner of her jaw. Her mouth opens a little further, nearly making the hungry sound he knows she wants to make. He wants to eat that sound, squeeze it out of her and swallow it down.
> 
> “Not desperate enough to fuck you,” she says. But she came when he called her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry that it's been a month. I'm sorry that the text I had posted at the bottom of the last chapter as "next time on" is nowhere in this chapter and may never actually appear anywhere in this story in that form. (I've altered it retroactively, to reflect what's here.)
> 
> I want to note that the texting in this fic appears to be iPhone-to-iPhone (if you have the skin turned on) just because that's what there's established AO3 code for; coding for Android messaging is unstable. Kylo, being dead, would be unlikely to have anything that wouldn't run off a pre-paid SIM card, and Rey would need something less expensive. (God forbid you should think I had made socioeconomically incorrect character choices, right?)
> 
> Also, someone asked about the Major Character Death tag: I mean, **spoilers** , but I'm not going to kill any heroic characters who aren't dead already in this story. The Major Characters in question are Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Buffy Summers. Some of the bad guys will die, though. Sorry.

Rey drags herself through the door of the apartment. She feels like she barely has the energy to keep the sword from dragging a groove in the wooden floor. Finn is wielding a mop while Rose follows behind him, phone tucked against her shoulder as she scatters some kind of powder in the trail of the mop. Rose says, “No, I _know,_ and I – oh thank _God!_ She’s here. She’s alive. Rey! Rey, are you okay? What happened? Did you kill it?”

“It’s dead.”

“She killed it. Rey, are you – ” The phone interrupts her, and she holds it out to Rey. “Leah wants to talk to you.”

Of course. There’s always a way this day could get worse. At least she doesn’t have to face her in person. _What happened, Rey? Well, I summoned a demon because I’m too fucked up to remember that my parents are dead, and then the evil undead version of your son helped me kill it, but not before it told me he actually does have a soul, which he killed your husband in spite of. Then I punched him around a little bit and sat on his face while he jacked himself off. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go wash his come off my thigh._

“Hey,” is what she says.

“What on _earth_ were you and Rose thinking?” Leah demands. “Do you understand what could have happened, with a Kelidanon demon on the loose in Brooklyn? Do you understand what a Kelidanon demon _is?_ What’s Rose doing?”

Rey blinks away the tears of shame which are threatening to spill from her eyes and swallows. “She’s, uh – she’s putting some powder on me?”

“Does it hurt?”

“No? Is it supposed to?”

“Oh thank God,” Leah says, and for a second Rey thinks _she_ might also have been on the edge of tears. “It didn’t touch you. Kelidanon demons are soul-eaters; if they touch you, they can suck out your soul. If it had touched you, the mixture Rose is rubbing on you would burn you very badly.”

Rey should tell her that she knows that, about Kelidanon demons, because Kylo Ren told her, and he helped her kill the demon. Even though he presumably doesn’t give a shit if it ate its way through the five boroughs. Even though – but now Leah’s talking again. “You’re the Slayer. Your duty is to _save_ people, not endanger them.” Her voice is gentler and less frantic than it was before, and she might even be trying to be funny, but the tears come back to Rey’s eyes and she feels like she’s two inches tall and made of shit. Her parents are dead; her parents were junkies or tweakers or crackheads or alcoholics and they would never have been proud of her no matter how good she was because they’re dead, and Leah isn’t proud of her because she’s so dumb and fucked up she summoned a fucking demon and then she fucked a fucking demon. Who is Leah’s son. And Leah is still talking, something about being glad Rey is all right or something, and oh – she must have asked Rey a question.

“Sorry; what?”

“How did you manage to kill it? It must have been enormous. And to kill it without touching it!”

“Ran down into the subway,” Rey says. “Tripped it on the third rail. Cut off its head.” She’s too tired for full sentences anyway. And how can she explain why she trusted Kylo? And why – 

“That was very clever,” Leah says, interrupting the train of the thought Rey keeps trying to have. And she sounds admiring, and Rey can’t fucking stand it, because it _was_ clever, but it wasn’t her idea. All her life people have thought Rey was smart because she was too stubborn to give up her parents’ accent and all her life she’s known they must be wrong. If she hadn’t had help she would have gotten herself eaten along with half of Brooklyn and it’s all her own fault.

“I need a shower.”

“Of course. And I’ll let you go in just a moment; I was actually going to call you anyway to let you know that I’m going to a Watchers’ retreat; it’s in Tangiers. I’ll be gone about a week, but please do _not_ hesitate to call if you have an emergency, and feel free to text me if you have any questions.”

“Okay,” Rey says, wondering if Kylo Ren qualifies as an emergency. Just, like, generally. At least this way she won’t have to look Leah in the eye _right_ after he son made her come. “Have… a good… time?”

Leah snorts. “With a bunch of Watchers? I think not. But I appreciate the thought.”

“Say hi to Giles if you see him,” Rey says. “Thank him again for me.”

She stumbles into the bathroom and drops the sword on the tile with a clang. Her coat and her boots and her jeans and her underwear. She doesn’t wait for the water to get warm; there’s a crust on her skin where he marked her, and she has to get it off her.

But it doesn’t really matter, does it? She still remembers what he wanted her to remember. What she did. How it felt. How wrong she wants. She can scrub all she wants; she’s not going to forget the white fire in her head from his mouth on her cunt.

She tries to think straight for a few seconds – there was something about the demon and Kylo and souls and suffering – but all she can remember is the shine of her on his wicked lips, and the dark thrill of his voice. _You should have been mine._

* * *

Kylo can’t sleep. No surprise; he didn’t leave his apartment early enough to get on the subway, so he’s trapped by sunlight in his bare, dark rooms, and all he can smell is her. She’s on his clothes, on his skin, and he’ll have to wash and wash before he goes to Snoke but he can’t. Not yet. 

He lies on his side and tries to catch the flavor of her again, rubbing his face with his hands and licking his fingers. He remembers her finger in his mouth, the taste of her blood. He wants to drink her down any which way he can. He wants to call her and tell her. Tell her everything he’s thinking, every pornographic detail, while he touches himself again to the sound of her breath. But why should she listen? Why should she do anything he wants? He wants to text her, _If you don’t know about Angelus, why won’t you fuck me?_

But why _should_ she let a footsoldier of Hell fuck her warm little mortal cunt? Just because he wants to so badly he can hardly think of anything else? Just because he wants every dream he has of her coming on his cock to be a prophecy? Prophecy is treacherous, he knows that. And he should be thinking about the prophecy. He’s a bad Watcher. And his Slayer is so good, so delicious; he wants just one more taste, and he remembers talking with Tai, about how Potentials were getting older, and Tai said, _Do you think that’ll make it harder? Normally the risk is Watchers getting too paternal; if they’re young women instead of teenagers –_

But even remembering Tai can’t make him stop. Even knowing that he’ll just get hungrier if he loses more fluids can’t make him stop. Even saying his prayers, which burn his mouth. Even pressing his fingers down the line of his scar, remembering the pain, and the casual way she called him _Scarface_ – nothing makes it stop, so he gives in and replays the whole thing in his head, kiss to climax. But that means that he remembers her saying, _He wanted you back._

And that makes him stop.

* * *

The book Leah lent him refers to a bunch of other books he hasn’t read, but Finn gets the idea. He puts his headphones in and plays a white-noise loop track and shuts his eyes. He focuses on his breathing. Oxygen coming into his body, filling his lungs and rushing into his veins. His blood, flowing, carrying out the vital business of his body. 

He has an advantage over the people the book was written for – he knows the difference. He knows how it feels to have your body moved by a demon, instead of human life. He knows how it feels to wake up dead, and then wake up alive again.

> By becoming aware of the body’s life on exactly the level of blood, a Watcher is able to gain control of the connection between blood and life, which vampires propagate by exploiting. (It is alleged that true masters of this technique even render their blood worthless as sustenance to vampires, thus thwarting them doubly.) This control in hand, the Watcher need only return to this concentration, and sever the connection.

Finn concentrates. He feels his blood. He feels his life. But he doesn’t feel like he has control.

* * *

Hux is there. Kylo already felt empty and ill, and now it’s worse: this fucker is here again. Not even Snoke wants him here now.

“I am not ‘putting you off,’” Snoke says coldly. “I am waiting. To see if everything will work the way you claim it will. Threshold magic has numerous loopholes.”

“I’ve closed all your loopholes. Every clause in those leases is tailored to your needs.”

“Mortal laws are not magical laws, and if you truly want to be one of us, the sooner you learn that, the better.” Snoke leans back in his chair. “What is your rush, in any case? You will have all eternity, won’t you?”

“With all due respect to your laws, Mr. Snoke, why should I age a day I don’t have to?”

“If you had _the due respect,_ you would remember that the correct title is _Master_ Snoke.”

“That’s what your court of vampires calls you. But you haven’t made me a vampire yet.”

“True. And so you do not have to suffer the penalties a vampire of my court would suffer for disrespecting me.” Snokes fangs are never hidden, but he has ways of arranging his face that make them more obvious. “A sire is a father to the vampires of his line, and like a good father, provides good discipline. Isn’t that so, Kylo Ren?”

“Yes, Master,” he says. This is easier. He’s done this for years, now, and he sinks down into it. The drone of his own obedience, the natural descent of his own evil. Like falling off a log, he tells himself. Just like falling.

“Kylo Ren isn’t even one of my own,” Snoke says confidingly to Hux. “He was turned by the Master of the Order of Ren – famous for their savagery, but sadly ignorant of what they created when they made him. Few of them survived the first hour of his rising. They called him a mad dog, you know, but with a little discipline – ” He smiles, that hideous, dangerous smile. “I have brought him to heel.”

“Yes, Master,” Kylo says, because he is supposed to.

“What did I do to you the last time you were difficult, my boy?”

He hesitates. From shame or from simple uncertainty about which was the last time and what happened, exactly. And because of the hesitation, Snoke opts for a demonstration, instead. His cold hand closes around the back of Kylo’s neck, and he throws him, face-first, to the floor. Kylo catches himself on his hands with his nose an inch from the floor, and then Snoke’s heel presses down on his head.

“So don’t be difficult,” he tells Hux smoothly. His weight leaves Kylo’s head and he gets up. “When can your theory be put to the test?”

“Friday,” Hux says. He doesn’t want to sound scared, and his face is straight, but he stinks of fear. He could still change his mind. He could still back out. It’s not too late for him. “I swear to you. Send your underlings to try it out; it’s unit 33. Friday night.”

“Then come back to us then. And not before. Kylo, see him out. Unharmed, this time.” 

And Kylo does what he’s told, because for him, it is too late.

* * *

“It’s a _hellhound,_ Poe,” Rey hisses.

“Lookit his tail! He’s all waggy.”

“It has three heads!”

“They’re good heads, Roy! 14/10; would pet.”

“You’ll lose a fucking hand.” But Poe is already headed for the dog. Rey reflects that if Poe had a tail, he would wag it a lot himself. She gets where he’s coming from, really; the hellhound _is_ wagging his tail. It has big black spots, like a cartoon puppy, and all six of its ears look soft. But it also stinks of sulfur and has teeth like knives, so all things considered she’s not too surprised when Poe has to leap backwards to avoid sacrificing any flesh to his new best friend. “I told you so.”

“Okay, so maybe petting’s off the menu. I’m still not going to _hit_ it.”

“Well, the hamburger isn’t working.” There is an ice-cream-scoop-sized chunk of raw meat sitting on the pavement just inside the radius of Rose’s spell, and the hellhound has shown no interest at all. Rey supposes it prefers its meat fresher. Maybe with a beating heart.

Rose gives them a panicky look, clearly straining to draw out the low, droning chant of her spell. “Maybe he’ll chase me?” Poe suggests.

“Maybe he’ll catch you!” Poe still seems to be considering the idea, which prompts Rey to panicked inspiration. She takes out her stake, which is, after all, just a stick which is pointed on one end, and calls, “Here boy!”

At least one head turns to her, which she hopes is good enough. She pulls her arm back theatrically, and yeets the stick straight into Rose’s area of effect. _“Fetch!”_

Three razor-toothed mouths open eagerly, one tail curls into an excited half-circle, and four paws spring into action. Rey’s stake is almost instantly reduced to splinters as its jaws crunch down, but tendrils of white light are wrapping around the hellhound’s big paws and sliding around his haunches. He gives Rey a wounded look of trust betrayed as Rose’s spell draws him back where he came.

“No time for skritches, huh,” Poe says sadly.

“It _was_ kind of cute,” Rose admits, dusting powdered violets off her fingers. 

Finn comes out where he’s been lurking behind a car, lowering the crossbow. _“Cute?_ Out of the four of us, somehow _I’m_ the only one who’s died so far? Make it make sense.”

“Three vamps dusted and a hellhound sent to hell,” Poe says. “Not bad for a Tuesday. I can drive you to up Leah’s place if you want; I need to check in myself.”

“She’s in Algeria,” Rey says. “Some Watcher conference. She says call for emergencies, text for questions.”

“Oh. It’s more of a tip, I guess? My buddy is working on a big welded sculpture for Hunts Point Park, and it’s gonna have a custom cast-iron base. Might be a good place to dump Anaquin’s blade.”

“I think she wanted to run some tests on it, actually,” Rose says, frowning a little. “She thought there was something weird about the way they used it to summon the demon.”

Rey’s phone buzzes. _Message from Scarface,_ her lock screen says. Speaking of summoning demons.

“That Leah?” Poe asks.

“Just an alarm,” she says, and stuffs it back into her pocket. But she can feel her cheeks warming, her whole body sparked to a low flame. _I could do it again. He would let me. He wants me to._

* * *

Kylo is numbly sure that Snoke will choose him for Friday. That’s before Phasma arrives from Los Angeles. Snoke sired Phasma himself, in France in 1913, and her sharp-cut, Art Deco beauty makes her look like she’s made of something stronger than the rest of them. Phasma cares nothing for prophecy and she’s never trusted Kylo; she regards him as inherently flawed, an engineering failure bound to collapse under the weight of his unnatural identity.

Kylo has no especially good counter-argument to this. He’s never tried to make one. Snoke does care about prophecy; the fragmentary translation of the Knossos Codex the Order of Ren had had were enough for him. Kylo thinks he enjoys, too, being the master of the vampire Watcher, Leah Organa’s demon-taken son.

But Phasma doesn’t trust him, and she has a protégé she wants to advance, and Kylo is not chosen for Friday. When he hears, he jerks away, facing the wall, and Snoke chides him for sulking. 

He should feel deprived, slighted, enraged. He does feel deprived. He is deprived. There’s a howling inside him, deep and furious. 

But his Slayer’s voice is there too. _You’re worse than all the rest._ He feels queasy, vertiginous. 

He feels relieved.

He says he’s going to go hunt. Instead he stands in the shower with his open mouth turned up to the hot stream of water and he jerks himself with a soap-slick hand, as slowly as he can, to everything he remembers. _Monsters don’t get to get fucked._

When he’s done, he stumbles out of the shower and blindly texts her.

He didn’t mean to. He swears he didn’t mean to.

* * *

She waits to read it until she’s alone in her room at home, lying on her back in the dark. She pretends not to notice the way her other hand has settled, with her thumb on the button of her jeans, and opens the message.

**Scarface:** Do you think about me?  
  


Rey blinks. That isn’t quite what she expected.

She could put the phone aside. It’s past five in the morning and it’s been almost forty minutes since he texted; she could turn the phone face-down and go to sleep, and by the time she wakes up, her silence will be plenty of answer.

If she weren’t lying alone in the dark, with her fingers lying along the seam of her pants, she might be able to pretend she wouldn’t be disappointed by that. Pretend she wasn’t hoping for something else when she opened the message.

**Me:** Should I have been  
  


(Because if she can’t admit she’s dying to come, she can at least let him know she’s spoiling for a fight. She could get both out of him, she knows.)

**Scarface:** There’s no “should” about it.  
  
**Me:** Fucking hell that was fast have you just been staring at your phone all night  
  
**Scarface:** I have it set to vibrate. It was in my pocket.  
  
**Me:** If you want to shove it up your ass I’ll keep texting  
  


For a moment, she thinks that’s scared him off. Wasn’t he in the closet or something? And she wonders if she was in the wrong there. Did that sound homophobic? He’s evil, but she doesn’t want to be an asshole. But he texts again.

**Scarface:** If you want to get me off, I have better ideas.  
  
**Me:** Oh yeah?  
  
**Scarface:** Your cunt.  
  
**Me:** Your shit at sexting you know that right  
  
**Scarface:** I don’t want to sext. I want to fuck you.  
  
**Scarface:** I want to see your tits.  
  
**Scarface:** I want to prick my fingers on your sharp little nipples again.  
  
**Scarface:** I could lift you so easily if you’d let me. Suck on your tits like I sucked on your clit.  
  
**Scarface:** Do you still have marks on your hips from my hands?  
  
**Me:** No  
  
**Scarface:** Let me make new ones. I’ll pick you up and bounce you on my cock until you come.  
  
**Me:** No  
  
**Me:** Monsters don’t get to get fucked  
  
**Scarface:** Yes  
  
**Scarface:** Fuck.  
  
**Scarface:** Call me. Call me and tell me that.  
  
**Me:** No  
  
**Scarface:** Come out, then.  
  
**Scarface:** Come meet me.  
  
**Me:** No  
  
**Scarface:** You shouldn’t.  
  
**Scarface:** I shouldn’t do this and neither should you.  
  
**Scarface:** But do it anyway.  
  
**Scarface:** I know you’re playing with yourself. Come out and play with me, Slayer.  
  


Fuck. Her fingers are in her pants, rubbing and rubbing, and she could just keep rubbing, keep making him ask her and telling him no. But she wants to hear him say it in her ear, in that ink-black voice with the grinding note of desperation in it; she’s burning up and she wants to feel him on her skin.

She slips her jacket back on and zips her boots back up. A fresh stake from the basket by the shoe rack fits in her pocket. The apartment door shuts almost noiselessly behind her.

**Me:** Where  
  


The pin he sends her marks a playground.

* * *

The metal play structure is painted what he’s sure is a cheerful red in daylight. At night it could be blood. He stays in the shadows until he’s sure she’s really here and he’s not hallucinating her, the way she vaults over the iron fence, the perfect curves of her ass and thighs glowing under the streetlights. Rey’s wary, too; she stalks a path that circles him, her hand on the weapon in her pocket. He walks a counter-path, silent as thought on the springy artificial turf, keeping his eyes on her.

She hesitates first; he corners her against the ladder of the slide, and her mouth is as warm as he remembers. She tastes like Oreos and halal-cart hot sauce and everything good that’s been taken away from him. He holds her head in both his hands, tangling his fingers in her hair to learn its texture, tilting her face to learn the angle of her chin.

“What did you kill tonight, to make you this desperate?” he asks her, kissing the corner of her jaw. Her mouth opens a little further, nearly making the hungry sound he knows she wants to make. He wants to eat that sound, squeeze it out of her and swallow it down.

“Not desperate enough to fuck you,” she says. But she came when he called her. And he can smell her. He pins her right wrist, works his fingers through hers. Hers are sticky. He can’t help it; he jerks them to his mouth and sucks her taste off them. Her head drops back a little, eyes almost closing as he mouths her little digits until she takes them away from him.

“You don’t want to fuck me?” he rasps, stroking down the line of her throat with his thumb. “Fine. Don’t fuck me. But I know you need to get off.” He can feel her pulse, smell every luscious drop of her. If he bit her she’d struggle against him while he drank, that frantic pulse filling his mouth. He wouldn’t survive the pleasure of it. She’s panting, defiant. All golden in the lamplight. “I’ll get you off.” His hands move over her shoulders, under her jacket, pushing it off her. “You get me off.” She shivers. “Okay?”

He didn’t mean it to be so much of a question; he meant to say _deal_ or _got it,_ not _okay?_ But that shiver. That tender little shiver when she felt the cold. Not very long ago, in another life, he took a vow to protect her. He wants to see her naked and know every deadly inch of her, and he wants to bite down on her and suck her dry, but he doesn’t want her to be cold.

Her face which was already wary, hardens as she nods. Her set lips are pink; he kisses them, hard, until she opens them, and he unbuttons her jeans and pushes them down, cupping his hands around her as he lifts her a little to perch on a higher rung of the ladder. Her panties are cotton, with fine pink stripes, and the way they stretch around his knuckles as he slides his hand into them is pornographic by itself.

She’s soaking. His fingers are dripping with her, and he has to grip the ladder over her head to keep it together. “Why… do you pant like that if you don’t… need to breathe?” she asks, breathless herself as he smoothes back her curls. He wants to push in, as deep as he can, thrust two fingers in and make her squeal. He might fucking lose it if he does. Might fucking lose it anyway, the way she’s squirming as he strokes her lips apart.

“Habit,” he grunts. “Body’s habit.”

“Oh, like this?” she asks, and her calf presses against his hard-on just as his fingers find her clit, and they both gasp. The steel bars crunch like soda cans in their too-strong grasps. “That just a _habit_ too? From when you used to be a man?”

Her tone is taunting; he’s so hungry and she smells so good. Anger rushes through his veins and he feels his face try to rearrange itself; he tamps it down but he still growls in his throat, inhumanly harsh, and he can’t stop his fingers from thrusting in so roughly she convulses. The arch of her spine bares her throat, and he channels the urge to bite into another rough thrust. He does it again, and again, watching the way it makes her move. Oh fuck. Her tits are bouncing, and her hair’s coming down from its knot. What a picture. What a dirty technicolor wet dream.

It feels like he’s holding her up with the hand that’s fucking her, three fingers splayed across her thighs as two work mercilessly in and out. Like she’s a pretty little puppet made for him to play with before he fucks her and eats her and walks away. _Yes,_ the demon in him, the demon who is him, hisses. But he _can’t._ She’s too _strong._ She’s clamping down on his fingers now, riding his hand in the rhythm she wants, and he’s going to die just from this, just from feeling her clench tight on his fingers while he looks up into her fierce, determined face.

“Let me see it,” he begs her, before he can stop himself. She’s so wet he can feel it dripping into the lines of his palm. “Let me see you come.”

Her hand claps down over his eyes. He tries to fight free, but she’s already coming; he can feel it, hear it, smell it, so he throws himself into it, pressing her back into the ladder with his whole body, trying to fill every sense with her, stamp her pleasure into his flesh like a souvenir penny. But he’s furious, even as he gulps down the dregs she gives him. He wanted that. He wanted to see her face when she came on his fingers. 

When her hand slips away she slips off his fingers, looking like the cat that ate the whole creamery. She knows what she’s done, the satisfaction she’s snatched away from him. He’s hungry; she’s starving him. “I’m not your fucktoy,” he snarls. 

“You asked me to come out and play,” she says, and her voice might be light if she weren’t so breathless, if he weren’t still pressing her against the little red steel ladder. It’s warped and crumpled where they’ve gripped it, as if someone had vandalized it with a blowtorch. “Thought you liked being my toy.”

“I’m a dangerous toy.” They had a deal. He grabs for her warm little hand, dragging it down where he wants it. Her hand closes over him and he thrusts into her grip. “A choking hazard. I ought to choke you with it.”

He just means to bait her, make her angry like she’d been in the pump room, make her grip him with that impossible strength and tell him he’s a monster. He doesn’t expect her lips to part and her pink tongue to flash over them. But that’s what happens, and once he’s seen that, who could blame him for being off his guard? For being paralyzed by that vision and all the visions that come with it?

Which is why he finds himself with _his_ back to the ladder. Her fingers are undoing his belt and opening his pants. He’s been dying to see her hand around his cock, clutching it like she clutches those stakes, but now all he can do is stare at her mouth. He tries to kiss it again, but she doesn’t let him. Instead she ducks down and fits the tip of him between her lips. Just the very tip. So he can feel the silky inside of her mouth, but not _enough._

He tries to push in, and meets the unyielding barrier of her teeth. The truth is that he could come just to this cruel tease of her warmth. He’s gotten off on much less than rubbing his hard cock against his Slayer’s innocent pink lips. But then she opens her mouth and takes him against her tongue.

 _“Fuck,”_ he swears, clutching at her head. Her hair’s messy and she’s making a mess of him. She sucks him in slowly, licks him, lets him go, and sucks him in again, taking him deeper. He feels her throat spasm, and his eyes almost roll back in his head before she scrapes him a little with her teeth and jolts him back from the edge. Then she starts over.

He wants to talk dirty to her, tell her just how good it feels, how pretty she looks gagging on his cock, how he wants to see her on her knees for him every night of his endless life, but he’s unbearably hard, and he can hardly think. She’s sucking him off. Slurping. Agonizingly slow, but with a look of pure relish on her face. Like she’s dying of thirst for him the way he is for her. It makes him shudder. “Do you want that?” he whispers, transfixed. “Do you want to drink my come? Swallow it all down?”

She takes her mouth off his cock, but she doesn’t answer, just tongues his balls in a way that makes him hiss and twitch. Anywhere she’s touched him, he’s warmer than her was, but the night air on his wet cock still gives him a chill. He fills his lungs with air and feels so close to alive.

“Do you know what time it is?” she asks, and he blinks. Her voice is mild, conversational. She blows warm breath through the short hairs low on his stomach, and looks up at him expectantly.

“What… time?”

Rey looks very pointedly east, and his gaze follows hers. To the dim glow gathering above the ambient glow of the city, lightening the black sky. “It’s about five minutes to sunrise.” She gives his cock an insolent little lick. “Guess we’re out of time.”

Sunrise is coming. He can smell that she’s right. There’s nothing in particular in his head that wasn’t there already. “Okay,” he says.

“‘Okay’?” she repeats incredulously, her false nonchalance fading. “I’m not kidding, Kylo. If you don’t run away you’ll go up in flames.”

“Okay,” he says again, looking down at her. Her lips are all wet, and the streetlights turn her messy hair into a golden-brown corona. Prophecy is treacherous, and if it isn’t him and her – well. It’s been a long time since he’s seen the sun.

“You cannot _possibly_ be that horny. You _can’t.”_ She jumps to her feet and jerks his pants back up for him. He winces a little; his cock is wet and weeping, and his clothes are rough and unwelcome after the softness of her mouth. “Okay? Playtime is over. Take your toys and go home.”

He just looks at her. It’s definitely a novel innovation in vampire slaying. He almost wants to write a paper about it; it’s probably not replicable in specific, but the general tactic hasn’t been common among Slayers for quite some time.

“You’re _going to die,_ you idiot.”

He shuts his eyes. _This is my oath as a Watcher: to give evil no quarter nor refuge, to admit no harm to the innocent –_

She’s stronger than he is. He’s a more experienced fighter; he has seven inches and probably close to a hundred pounds on her; he’s stealthier, and they’re probably equally fast. But in brute-force terms, the acceleration of matter – she’s stronger. So when she seizes him by the scruff of his neck and drags him, there isn’t that much he can do about it.

She jumped the playground’s fence to get in, but to get out, she kicks out the rusted lock on the gate and yanks him through. When she starts to put him in a fireman’s carry, he stumbles a step or too forward, and she settles for hauling him by the elbow, one block north and across a dead intersection. When they come to another fence, she doesn’t hesitate; he feels her trying to lift him. He knows she could do it. She’s strong enough. But if she isn’t going to let him die – he’s not going to be dead weight in the face of destiny.

He jumps, assisting her throw, and lands on his hands and knees in the damp grass. She lands lightly beside him in a graceful crouch, before she rises and kicks him through the leaded-glass doors of a mausoleum. 

_“What the fuck is wrong with you?”_ she shouts, as he pulls himself into the shadows at the back of the tomb. If his heart could beat, it would be racing; as it is, his thoughts jump and skitter like water on hot oil. She stalks towards him, stake in her fist, but she didn’t haul him in here just to dust him. “You can’t stalk me around New York, involve me in your dumb vampire feud, help me kill a demon, eat me out in a subway tunnel, and then _guess I’ll die_ when I blow you! And if you hate your soul so fucking much, why didn’t you let that demon have it, huh?”

He turns his head away. Of course she wants him to explain the one thing he can’t. “Things have to… happen a certain way. I read the last prophecy in the Knossos Codex. If it means what I think it does, then I wasn’t going to die in that park. And I didn’t. You saved me.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t about to go to your mom and say, ‘Oh yeah, your son fingered me and then I sucked his dick and then I let him burn up.’”

“I’m not her son,” he says stiffly.

She plants herself in front of him, looking challengingly into his eyes. “How come you think you’re my Watcher then?”

“I am your Watcher,” he snaps. 

“Yeah? ‘Cause I think if my file went to anybody before it went to _your mother,_ it went to some guy named Ben Szolo, who was definitely Leah’s son.”

“You don’t understand.” How can he explain? “I’m a demon. The demon is me. I have memories. The memories are me. The soul is me too. None of them are _more_ me than any other part.” The morning sun spills into the narrow mausoleum, and he paces the little square of shadow he has left. “I want to kill people. Hurt them, make them afraid, bite down on their throats and drink their blood. Because I’m a demon. But I remember – I studied. I trained. I swore an oath. I put my entire _life_ towards killing demons. And while I didn’t have a soul, I could shake that off. I could remember it, use it, but not care. But the soul makes it _stick.”_

“It makes you care.” She’s watching him so intently. Like she can peel back the layers – soul – demon – 

“Everything I’ve done – everyone I’ve killed, everyone I’ve hurt, every principle I’ve betrayed and every oath I’ve broken – the soul makes them all stick to me. Surround me. Awake or asleep. And it hurts. It hurts so much.” Her hand brushes over her heart, and he realizes she’s mirroring him. His own fingers are digging into his chest. “But _what’s hurting?_ The demon’s not hurt! And the soul’s what makes it hurt! And memories can’t be hurt; they’re only memories! _What hurts?”_

“You,” she says, hazel eyes unwavering. Hard and sweet, just like the Kelidanon demon said. Can he stand to watch her lose that soul? Not while he still has his. “You, the person you are. That’s what hurts.”

“There is no person. After I died, I killed the vampire who made me and they asked me what I wanted to be called. And I said – I said _κοίλο,_ hollow – because if I let them make me a vampire then I wasn’t a Watcher and if I wasn’t a Watcher I was _nothing!”_ His fist pounds over his dead heart. She stares at him, his Slayer, the one he’s failed above all others. He has hurt other people, many other people, worse than he can stand, but she’s the one he’s _failed._ He tries to explain. “This is my oath as a Watcher: to give evil no quarter nor refuge, to admit no harm to the innocent, to put my learning in service of the Slayer and be a guard to her and her kin.” She’s backing away from him. He’s failed; he’s put her in harm’s way; he’s going to hurt her himself. How many times has he said these words, prepared himself to say them? He lashes out with his fist; a marble plaque cracks and pain crackles up his arm. “By my oath I make myself a weapon against Hell; by my oath I place myself between the world and the powers of darkness.” But he is Hell, now, too. He keeps hitting, and marble chips and shatters. Blood smears where he’s hit, and he doesn’t mean to shout, to scream, but he does. _“If ever from now until the hour of my death I should fail in this, give me no hope of honor or forgiveness, and let the grave erase my name.”_

He keeps hitting, the steady crunch of his blows the only thing he can hold onto, until her fingers dig like cold iron into his wrist and everything goes quiet. “This is a grave,” she says quietly. “Those stones are for people who are lost. Who are mourned. Don’t hurt them anymore.”

 _Am I lost? Am I mourned?_ he thinks, and looks into her eyes. Her parents. Her parents are dead, lost to a disease a child couldn’t understand, and she could never give them marble stones like this.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

“You’re hurt,” she says, and touches neither his bleeding fist nor his aching heart. She puts her hand over his eyes again, gently this time. “It’s daytime. You should sleep.”

He puts his hand over hers, willing her to stay, but she slips away from him and steps into the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> Rey dreams she’s in a cemetery. The cemetery isn’t Green-Wood. There’s a man there, and he smells so good, like clean rain and basil and demon. She hates him so much it hurts her teeth, and she wants him to hold her and keep her safe while she tells him all about it.
> 
> “Sure,” the man says, “Spike’s killed a Slayer or two. Plenty of vampires have. But I think I might be the first vampire in history to make a Slayer come.”
> 
> “I was faking it,” she says, flatly. Her heart is pounding. That’s what she should say, right? Or does faking it make her – she can’t think about that right now.
> 
> “C’mon,” the man says, smiling. “You really think I can’t tell?”
> 
> “Go away, Angel,” she says, and turns her back. She can still hear every blade of grass that bends under his feet.
> 
> “Drusilla calls me Angelus,” he says, still at her shoulder.
> 
> “Are you seriously trying to make me jealous of Drusilla?”
> 
> “Oh, you will be,” he says, and leans in close to her ear. “All she had to lose was her family. You have friends, too.”
> 
> * * *
> 
>  _κοίλ-_ is an uncommon but apparently genuine word root in Ancient Greek, referring to things which have been hollowed out. (I do not speak Ancient Greek.)
> 
> Thanks this week to [bobaheadshark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobaheadshark/pseuds/bobaheadshark) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/bobaheadshark)), a charitable donor who requested a cameo by my brother's dog, Bowie. Bowie is a good boy who loves playing fetch more than he loves food, but in real life he of course has only one head and regular puppy teeth. And thanks as always to [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/Bombastique1)) for reading and reassurance. My apologies again to everyone for the delay.


	10. Cursed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> “What did you mean,” she asks, slowly, “when you said _it’ll hurt less for both of us?”_
> 
> He doesn’t look at her or move or say anything. She waits. It feels like minutes and minutes and minutes drag by as she looks at the unmoving edge of his face. Then his voice comes out like ground glass.
> 
> “The Watcher will fall, and he will kill two fathers. The Slayer will know him, and he will bring her down. He will take blood and life, and a new and terrible mouth will open.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have updated the tags a bit, since people expressed concern for Kylo's orgasms (sorry, Kylo) and because this chapter contains scenes of people with supernatural consciousnesses hallucinating in a way which should not be read as a representation of human mental illness.
> 
> Also, for those readers who aren't Buffy-watchers or are in the process of watching now: (a) I love you, and (b) please note that this chapter contains MASSIVE spoilers for the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Finn dreams. He dreams he’s riding with his dad in the mail truck, like Take Your Child to Work Day, except he’s an adult, and his dad won’t look at him, which is upsetting. His dad jogs back and forth from the truck with a package, and he still doesn’t look at Finn.

“Dad,” he says, “what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” his dad says, promptly. “Always glad to have you here. Glad you’re well.”

“How come you’re not looking at me, then?”

“You’re too bright,” Dad says. “Hurts my eyes.”

“It’s true,” Rose says, as she takes a whole crate full of mail, staggering under the weight.

Finn looks down at his hands. They glow. They glow bright white, with an undertone of green. He checks himself in the side mirror. He can barely make out his features; he’s just a light. 

“I look like the stars on my bedroom ceiling,” he says.

“Ursa Major,” says Kylo Ren, in obnoxious didactic mode. He leans over a mailbox and hands Finn’s dad a knife.

Finn cranes his head, and catches a slow dimming rhythm in the glow, just under his jaw. His pulse. He waits with calm sadness for his father to stab him, but he just puts the knife down between them on the gear shift. “Go on then. Be careful not to hurt yourself.”

Finn picks up the knife. It’s cool in his hand, and his luminance glistens along its blade. He draws it down the back of his hand. Light spills out everywhere. There’s no pain. Just more and more light. And Finn feels stronger and stronger and stronger.

He wakes up alone in bed, and lies for a few minutes listening to the faint sounds of Rose cracking eggs in the kitchen. When he walks out to join her, she scoops a thin circle of scrambled egg onto a bowl of cold sticky rice. She’s cooked it in chili oil, and hands him the sriracha before he can ask. He sets the bowl down on the counter so he can hug her with both arms.

They’re both surprised when Rey walks in. She looks blank and confused and sad. “You went out again?” Rose asks.

“Yeah.” Rey doesn’t say anything else. She takes off her shoes, and just stands there by the shoe rack, looking blank.

“Are you okay?” Rose follows up, hesitantly.

“Yeah,” Rey says, nodding her head vigorously. Then she stops again, blank. Rose moves closer, and Finn stays where he is, watching. Rey opens her mouth, shuts it, opens it again. “Sometimes I – I’ve been having a hard time remembering that my parents are dead. I mean, for years, I guess. But also – lately.”

He knows. They’ve had to trash a whole area rug and curb-rescue a new coffee table because Rey has trouble remembering that her parents are dead. But, when he’s just woken up from dreaming of his father, it catches at Finn’s heart in a way which is different from pity. He crosses to Rey; when she doesn’t look at him, he puts his hand on her arm. She jerks like he’s shaken her awake.

“Hi,” he says. “My name’s Finn, and I’m an orphan.”

Rose takes Rey’s other arm. “Hi.” Her mouth is pinched in the painful half-smile she always gets when she’s afraid she might cry. “My name’s Rose, and I’m an orphan.”

Rey looks at them wildly. “My – my name is Rey.” Her voice is a tremulous little warble. “My name’s Rey, and I’m an orphan.”

Finn says, “We know what it’s like. Or maybe we don’t. But we’ll listen. Okay?”

“Okay,” Rey says, and then she starts to sob so hard that the two of them have to hold her up between them to get her to the couch. Sometimes she just cries. Sometimes, she whispers things out in hoarse, wet bursts. Accents start to form at birth, Finn knows. But they’re easy for children to change. Rey has refused to change, for so, so long, hanging on to a life she never really had with parents she’ll never see again. But that’s how it is, isn’t it? You can refuse to change all you want. But the world doesn’t need your permission. Things change, and change, and they change you.

Finn’s changed so many times. He remembers the light from his dream, pouring out of him like blood.

* * *

Kylo doesn’t dream. He doesn’t sleep. He hunches over his knees in the dark corner of the mausoleum and he waits and he tries not to think. Thinking doesn’t help with prophecies. They can’t be outsmarted. They can’t be escaped. 

He tries to tell himself this when it runs in his head. _The watcher will fall, and he will kill two fathers._ He’s the first domino. He fell, and everything will fall with him.

The sun is just setting when she appears between the broken doors.

“If it hurts you to do bad things,” she says challengingly, not even a hello, “why do you stay with Snoke? Why do you kill people and steal their books for him?”

She makes it seem so simple, like he can move from one side of the board to another. But chess pieces don’t move themselves. “You think I should go back to the Council? After I let myself be turned? To my mother? After I killed my father? You think that’s _possible?_ You think that would hurt me _less?”_

“Than letting yourself do more and more things you hate? Just more and more until you die? Which you won’t, unless I kill you? Is that what all this following me around is about; is this a suicide thing?”

Her face is stormy, like she’ll be furious if he says yes. He supposes it’s no fun to hunt things that want to die. “No,” he says, and the storm abates, but only a little.

“I don’t see why you have to stick with Snoke, though. You killed the vampire who sired you, right? So it’s not as though you’re filled with vampire loyalty. Just leave.”

He’s seen her file. A lot of write-ups for fighting, disrespect. None for running away. “If I leave, he’ll track me down.”

“Why?”

“There’s a… prophecy.” He swallows. He can’t tell her. Watchers have to be able to lie to their Slayers; Uncle Luke said it was the hardest part. The second hardest part. That it was easier to tell a variation on the truth. A fragment. “He thinks I can help him open the Hellmouth. He’s wrong, but if I tell him that, I’ll be nothing but a liability to him.”

“So kill him. Like that other vamp. Pryde.”

“I can’t kill Snoke. He’s stronger than I am.”

“I could help you.”

The light in her lovely, wary face makes him want to fall to his knees. Or further. “Even then. You’re strong. But he’s hundreds of years old, and he has a full court.” Her mouth sets. She doesn’t want to be dissuaded. She wants to help him. He steps through the long shadow and presses his mouth against hers.

She breathes in deeply through her nose, and when he moves his lips to her jaw, she exhales, ruffling warmth through his hair. Her hands run down his neck, and he shivers. But she puts her hands on his shoulders and pushes him away.

“Why did you kill your father?” she asks, and her tone is so even and her eyes are so narrow that he knows she knows. If she knows he shouldn’t have to answer. He turns his head away. _Show me your face. Your real face. The face of my son._

“Poe said your dad thought there might be other vampires around. There were. Weren’t there.”

“I was always going to kill him. I meant to kill him before the spell worked.”

“But you broke his neck. Like you broke the archivist’s neck. Before you ate her. Your mother thought that was strange. No one could possibly have heard someone scream in the tunnels, and Finn told me dead people don’t taste as good, but you broke her neck because it’s fast.”

His viscera twist and cramp. The archivist. He tries not to remember. It makes him feel sick, and it makes him feel hungry. 

“Snoke’s whole court was there, weren’t they? When your father brought your soul back. And you didn’t think you and Poe and he could fight them. So you killed your father so Poe would think it hadn’t worked, and he’d run away. And survive.”

“So I could survive. Poe was just… it was what I would have done no matter what.”

She draws her brows down into a fierce angle over her bright eyes. “You don’t have to stay with Snoke, Ben,” she says forcefully.

He lets the demon claw its way out, lets his fury and frustration show in ridges and fangs as the night deepens. “This is what I am now, and it’s not _Ben.”_

“I kind of think that might be bullshit, Kylo Ren.” He growls, but before he can argue, she sighs. “Look, I don’t have time for this. I have to go fight something that looks like evil Bulbasaur in Queens, and then I’m gonna do a vamp sweep on the UES. And when I’m done, I’m going to go to fucking bed because my sleep debt is up there with my credit card debt, and then I’m going to try to pitch a 5k think-piece on how that’s a Millennial Mood, and then I’m going to build some furniture and walk some dumbass dogs and bang out my lukewarm take. And maybe _then_ I will text you and you can… explain. Or whatever.”

 _Or whatever._ “What’s the thing in Queens?” he asks.

“Demon. Four legs. Red eyes. Got like an onion from hell on its back.”

“It’s a qerilak,” he says, processing this description. “Venomous. Don’t let it bite you.”

“I don’t let anything bite me,” she says, and she’s gone.

* * *

Rey comes home exhausted and unbitten, falls into bed, and dreams. She dreams she’s in a cemetery. The cemetery isn’t Green-Wood. The sky is dark, with no edging of the city’s glow. There’s a man there, and he smells so good, like clover and demon. She hates him so much it hurts her teeth, and she wants him to hold her and keep her safe while she tells him all about it.

“Sure,” the man says, “Spike’s killed a Slayer or two. Plenty of vampires have. But I think I might be the first vampire in history to make a Slayer come.”

“I was faking it,” she says, flatly. Her heart is pounding. That’s what she should say, right? Or does faking it make her – she can’t think about that right now.

“C’mon,” the man says, smiling. “You really think I can’t tell?”

“Get lost, Angel,” she says, and turns her back. She can still hear every blade of grass that bends under his feet.

“Drusilla calls me Angelus,” he says, at her shoulder.

“Are you seriously trying to make me jealous of Drusilla?”

“Oh, you will be,” he says, and leans in close to her ear. “All she had to lose was her family. You have friends, too.”

“Well, newsflash, _Angelus,”_ she says, and pulls out her stake. “I’ve got some other things she didn’t have.”

He’s out of arm’s length in a flash, but his smile is slow. “Joyce doesn’t, though, does she? Willow’s not too good with a stake. And Xander, well… he’s not good for much, is he?”

She lunges for him. She knows it isn’t fast enough.

“Just remember,” he says, still smiling. “When you start finding the bodies. Who we’ve all got to thank.”

She hates him so much it turns her stomach. She hates him so much it floods her eyes with tears. She hates him so much she could kill him, and she remembers his bare skin against hers.

Rey wakes up.

It’s just past 5AM, and she has no idea what time that is Tangiers but she hopes it isn’t something terrible because she’s already calling.

“Rey?” Leah asks.

“I had a dream I was a Slayer. A different Slayer, I mean. There was a vampire called Angelus.” _The Kalderash made that curse to make Angelus suffer._ “I think I – the other Slayer, I mean – I think I’d done something wrong.”

There’s a very long pause on the other end. “Rupert,” she hears Leah say, “please call whoever you need to in LA to check on Angel.”

“I called him Angel,” Rey says, hearing Giles faintly in the background: _Good God. Right away._ “She did, I mean.”

“Yes,” Leah says. “Rey, I think you dreamed about being Buffy. Can you tell me what happened?”

Rey tells her, as best she can, digging her fingers into her knee so she doesn’t get pulled under into the dream like last time. It helps that her mind keeps fidgeting the whole time, wondering. _Angelus._ She tries to sort through her memory. _Who’s Angelus? Why would it make him suffer?_ He hadn’t answered. A soul; it’s something to do with a soul.

 _Cordelia says he’s quite himself,_ Giles says to Leah, and Leah makes a cautious _hmmm_ noise into the phone before she speaks.

“Angelus was a vampire in the line of the Master of the Order of Aurelius. He was sired in the 18th Century, and he was infamous for being cruel. All vampires are killers; not all of them are sadists. Angelus was.”

“Was – so he’s dead?”

“No. Like many vampires, Angelus found it convenient to prey on the people at the margins of society, and just before 1900, he preyed on a Kalderash Roma girl. As retribution for her rape and murder, her family cursed him with the return of his human soul.”

Leah’s voice is cool and measured. _She knows I know her husband tried it,_ Rey thinks. “How is that a curse?”

“The return of his soul was the return of his conscience. He had countless murders to his name. The guilt must have been unfathomable.” Rey’s Watcher still sounds almost clinical. “He vanished from Watcher records until 1996. He was calling himself Angel, and he… ”

She trails off. Rey waits, and suddenly the voice on the line is British and strained. “Rey? Hello? Are you there?”

“Yes. Giles?”

“Yes. Forgive me for hijacking the conversation, but as Leah and I are alone, I thought we might all talk together, if you don’t mind. And spare Leah the pains of choosing her words for my benefit. Though of course I appreciate her concern.” 

“Thank you,” Leah says. “Rey, Rupert was there.”

“Yes. I’m afraid I was. Angel began a romantic relationship with my Slayer. Buffy. She loved him very much, and I believe he loved her too. Unfortunately, however. The relationship became, ah. Physical.”

Rey has a sinking feeling in her stomach, kind of like the sick feeling from her dream. Giles goes on. “The Kalderash curse was not simple. It returned Angel’s soul. If he were to experience even a moment of true happiness, however, the soul would be taken again. Angel was unaware of this clause. Almost everyone was. And apparently, for Angel, the… consummation of his relationship with Buffy constituted a moment of perfect happiness.”

Giles and Leah are in Algeria. They feel further. Everything feels far away. “Sex. Sex made him lose his soul.” She remembers the nauseous feeling of guilt from her dream. The intimate memories and the smiling monster.

“Yes. Angelus’s methods are frequently psychological, and I’m afraid the circumstances gave him rather a leg up. He killed… several people. Tortured at least one other. And tried to, ah, end the world.”

“But he’s not dead.”

“No; it’s a bit complicated, but he was eventually restored, and he’s currently, ah, active in Los Angeles. I must say I’m a bit puzzled as to why you dreamt of him, but it may be a premonition of some risk that his soul will be lost again.”

“No,” Rey says. Her voice is faint but she’s so angry and she’s so sure. _Fuck me, Slayer. Give me my moment of bliss._ “It’s about Kylo Ren. His father put the same curse on him.” She listens desperately for some reaction from Leah, but nothing comes.

Giles begins, “I was under the impression that he had _tried_ to use the curse – ”

“It worked. I’m sorry, Leah. The soul-eater demon told me. I should have told you, but you were so mad at me, and – and I – ” There’s absolutely nothing from the phone but faint white noise. If Leah was angry with her before, what will she do now?

“It worked,” Leah says. “But he still killed his father.”

“Yes, but I – I think – Snoke was there. With his whole – cult or whatever. If he hadn’t killed Han, they would have killed Poe and Han and him.”

“If that were true. He could have told me. He could have sent me a note – a message – if he had a _reason_ he could have told me _why.”_

“He won’t leave Snoke. He thinks he’s too far gone or something. I don’t know what to do.”

“Perhaps – ” Giles begins, hesitant.

“Maybe he is too far gone,” Leah says harshly. “He had a duty. Luke did it. Tai did it. He was a Watcher. He was my _son. How could he. How could he do this?”_

“Leah,” Giles says gently.

“Leah, I’m so sorry – ”

“Rey, may we call you back? I think Leah may need a – ”

“Rey, you idiot, I wasn’t mad at you; I was _worried._ You could have been killed or – ” The harsh tone cracks and she almost wails. _“Ben.”_

“Rey,” Giles says firmly, “we will have to call you back. _Do_ be careful.”

But they don’t call back. And dawn comes on in New York City and Rey has furniture to assemble and dogs to walk and all kinds of shit to do, but she sits by her bed and stares at her phone, replaying everything, and getting angrier and angrier, and just before the time she knows Rose sets her alarm for, she drops a text in the group chat, shrugs on her coat, and walks out the door.

She’s the Slayer. She’s going hunting.

* * *

_Cortlandt Rector Whitehall South Ferry._ The crowds thin out and the morning rush hour ends, and Kylo still can’t sleep, too starving and wild. He keeps thinking he can smell her. The way she smells after a kill, when she’s hot and hungry. And then two boots plant themselves right at his toes and he _can_ smell her. 

“Do you know how many Rs I’ve gotten on and off, you asshole? Anyway, this is your stop,” she informs him, and it’s 10:30 in the morning so nothing is his stop but she smells so good and she tilts her head towards the door, which bares her neck a little. He follows her out onto the Court Street platform. He can smell himself on her, just a little, lingering like smoke on her leather jacket. If he dragged her back against him now and shoved his hands back under her underwear where they belong, would someone call the police? Or would the few late commuters just push past them while she lets him do what he wants? He could hold her still and put his teeth in her and just take a little sip – 

“So,” she says, taking the first set of stairs briskly, “you know how Slayers have dreams sometimes? Like, special dreams which are actually real?”

“Yes,” he says, because it’s practically Slayers 101 and he knows a few things about strange dreams himself.

“Well, I just had one.” The elevators are opening, in their jerky, sluggish way, but she yanks open the door to the emergency stairwell. The alarm doesn’t sound, and she kicks the door shut behind him. “It was about this vampire called Angelus. Heard of him?”

Fuck.

“Yeah. I know you have, because you fucking namechecked him. You and he are like, same hat! Same curse! And you thought you could get out of it the same way, huh? I can’t believe I almost _literally_ sucked your soul out through your dick!”

“You almost got me burnt to cinders.” His voice sounds thick and stupid.

“And whose fucking fault is that?” she spits. “Who made you stay, huh?” Her fingers rake lanes into her tied-back hair. “I can’t believe I almost fell for it.”

He slumps against the door, wretched, and follows her with his eyes as she paces the tiny landing at the foot of the emergency stairs.

“Is that why you helped me with that soul-eater and you wouldn’t let it touch you? You’re so fucking determined to be a bad guy now that you just wanted to do it in the worst fucking way, so _I’d_ feel fucking terrible and your _mom_ would feel even worse than she does now _which is a whole fucking lot, by the way,_ and then what? You’d have really double for-sure proved how evil you are?”

Kylo closes his eyes, which is bad, because it just helps him picture his mother more clearly. Her face crumpled with tears for her son and the Slayer she thinks of as hers. She’ll blame herself. She probably already blames herself for not teaching him better, for not sending him away earlier so he could train harder. No matter how this prophecy comes to pass, she’ll blame herself for failing Rey.

“I can’t believe you made me think you _wanted_ me,” she says, in a small, bitter voice, and his eyes snap open.

“What?”

“Letting me think you were letting me use you when really you were trying to use me. All just a stupid fucking trick to make me feel like shit so you could show how bad you are.”

He lets himself circle in towards her, as close as he dares, breathing in until he can taste her in his throat. “You think I don’t want you? Don’t want you enough to let you use me? You really do have a selective memory, Slayer.” Her eyes are wide, blazing with fury, and he trails two fingers up the inside of her thigh, where he’d smeared her skin with come. “I’ll let you do a lot of things, but I won’t let you lie to yourself.”

She slaps his hand away. It stings like hell, but she could have broken his wrist. “You were trying to trick me. You just wanted to get rid of your soul.”

“I wanted to lose my soul,” he breathes. He can feel how tense she is; she’s ready to strike, but she’s quivering, too. “I wanted to fuck you. Take off all the clothes off that pretty body and feel your dripping little cunt around my cock. You let me taste you and feel you and I just wanted you more. I wanted to make you feel good. You need it so badly, don’t you? When you come back fresh from a hunt and your body’s so hot and hungry. I know. I wanted to give you everything you need. Make you come so hard you can’t see straight. Make you come over and over until you can’t feel anything else.” She licks her lips, and he lets his hand drift back to her leg. “I still want to.” The stairway’s good; he can put her on a high step so she’s just the right height. “Don’t you want me to?”

Her fingers are barely long enough to circle his wrist, but that doesn’t make her grip less steely. It’s her duty to fight and kill him, and she’s strong enough for the task. She drags him down until they’re nose to nose and he’s tangled in the green-brown threads of her eyes. 

“What if I don’t? What if I just want to keep getting off on your face without touching your cock? What if I just want to grind on your thigh until I come and I don’t want you to move while I do it? What if I just want you to stand there and watch while I touch myself and tell you everything I’m thinking of that I’m not letting you do?”

That’s not what he had in mind. That’s not what he planned. But the three images she’s just handed him, and the sound of her voice spelling them out, consume all available processing power in his brain. 

“Okay,” he says, thick-tongued.

“Okay?” she repeats, frowning, and then he kisses her again, because she pulled him so close to her mouth that maybe she wants that, too. For a moment he thinks he doesn’t care; she’ll forgive him everything once it’s done, won’t she? And if she forgives him, what will he care about anything else?

Then she leans away, and he sees her eyes again, and he knows it will destroy him.

“On the ground again,” she says, and he goes, because there’s a way he wants it to happen, and there’s the way it has to be. She’s taking off her pants. It’s warm in the stairwell, and the late morning trains rumble drowsily below them. He’s so hungry, and he remembers the way she tastes. 

And then she’s unbuckling his belt, and he jerks. She said she just wanted to get off.

“Oh,” she says, sweet and dangerous, her hand warm on his cock as she pulls it free, “I’m going to fuck you.”

“You are?”

“My life is pretty stressful and I think I deserve some nice hard dick, personally.” She throws her leg over him; her hand rubs the head of his cock idly against the silky heat of her slit, and he groans and claws at the concrete. “I work quite hard, actually, and I think I deserve to come, don’t you?” She stops, looking down at him, just the tip of him fitted shallowly against her. “You, though.” She sinks down, slowly, slowly, just an inch and Ben’s eyes roll back in his head. His back arches, and he gasps for air he doesn’t need as she slowly rises off him, lips clinging to his cock. “You’re a vampire. And vampires… can’t come inside without permission.” He jerks his hips up, and she sinks back down, a little further this time. Her voice is breathless and mocking. “My Watcher told me so.”

“That’s funny,” he snarls, grasping for her hips. She’s barely letting him have anything, sliding just the tip of him in and out of her. He’s going to roll her over, pin her down, and make her scream. “Very funny.”

“It’s not a joke.” Her voice is cold and something presses down hard and sharp on his breastbone. It’s a wooden stake. She’s got it between the straining buttons of his shirt, the point almost biting into his skin. “You don’t get to come.” She swallows hard, and her head tips back as she sinks down a little further onto his cock. _“Uh. Fuck. Fuck._ Don’t come. If you come, I’ll fucking kill you.”

She rolls her hips; she’s only halfway down his cock. He pulls at her. He needs to be balls-deep in her. But she doesn’t let him; she flexes the muscles in her strong thighs and keeps herself right where she wants.

 _“Fuck,”_ she moans again, sliding almost all the way down. Up. Down. It’s so slow. It’s agonizing. She’s trapped him here, in this limbo between subway and street, and she’s torturing him. Her head lolls again, baring her soft throat. He feels dizzy, delirious. “Fuck, you fill me up.”

He curses too, because he knew he would, and he can feel that he does; he can feel the way she has to stretch for him. His dazed eyes move between the hazy, pleasured look on her face and the soft, slick pink that splits around his cock. He feels with his thumb for her clit. When he finds it, she clenches around him with a whimper, but the stake stays steady between them, digging in when he bucks too hard. And then she starts to ride him faster.

“That’s it,” he growls. “Fuck. So _tight._ Ride me harder, Slayer. Come on my cock. Let me fuck my soul into your _sweet – warm – ”_

The wood breaks his skin. “You can’t come.”

It’s an inch from his heart. He’s so close to dying, and it only gets him closer to coming. She’s squeezing him so hard it aches and he’s never wanted anything so much.

“Please,” he begs her. “Please come, Rey. Please let me come.”

“No. Fuck. Feels so good.” There are dark drops of his blood among the fine light checks of his shirt. She could kill him. It’s her destiny, to hunt and kill vampires. He rubs his thumb down harder on her clit. She shudders; her hips grind a circle. Her whole body is a weapon made to kill him.

“Rey. Please. Let me come. It’ll hurt less. For both of us.”

“No. I’m gonna come. You can’t.” She knocks his hand away, replacing it with hers, and draws herself up and off his cock with a moan that cuts his soul. She slumps forward, dropping the stake and bracing herself on his shoulder as she rubs herself off. He looks up, shocked, into her wild, wounded eyes as she sobs and shivers in her climax.

He ought to do it now. Right now, on the concrete floor, with the subway rumbling beneath them and the city rushing by overhead. There isn’t going to be a better time. But even though he’s starving and his whole body cramps with frustration, his face won’t cooperate. He tries to bring the demon to the surface, but it sinks down inside him. Every part of him feels weighed down by the grief in her bright eyes. The shallows wound in his chest burns as it starts to heal, and he turns his face away.

* * *

Rey is so tired. Her head drops of its own accord for a second, her forehead settling beneath his clavicle. His skin, through his shirt, is cool, and his chest is soft. There’s blood on his shirt. “Sorry,” she says, automatically.

He jerks like he’s been pinched, and she sits up and gets off him. She should have spent the last four hours catching up on sleep and trying to sell some clickfarm editors on her hot take about debt, not sniffing out vampires… this particular vampire… and fucking with him to get her rocks off. God, she’s so fucked up. Fucked up, and – she can’t help but notice as she gingerly pulls her jeans back up – really just very well and thoroughly fucked. She’s going to be sore tomorrow.

(God, his eyes when she came. Dark as night and fixed on hers like she was every star in the heavens. And so, so sad.)

She looks back at him. She thought he’d jerk himself off again, smear more come into her skin, but he hasn’t really moved. Among his mussed clothes, his cock is glistening wet and an angry red. She wonders if it hurts.

“What did you mean,” she asks, slowly, “when you said _it’ll hurt less for both of us?”_

He doesn’t look at her or move or say anything. She waits. It feels like minutes and minutes and minutes drag by as she looks at the unmoving edge of his face. Then his voice comes out like ground glass.

“The Watcher will fall, and he will kill two fathers. The Slayer will know him, and he will bring her down. He will take blood and life, and a new and terrible mouth will open.”

“What?”

“The Knossos Codex. It’s the last prophecy. I was a Watcher; when I failed, I fell. I killed my human father, and I killed the vampire who sired me. Snoke thinks the rest of the prophecy means you’ll recognize me as my mother’s son, and then I’ll kill you, and the Hellmouth will open.” 

Rey’s gone cold. He goes on. “Snoke’s being too literal. And also not literal enough. I won’t bore you with the Phoenicio-Punic, but… it’s not a Hellmouth. It’s a person’s mouth, _your_ mouth.” Finally he turns his face back towards her. It’s a long grim mask, with despair in his eyes. “I’m going to kill you, and I’m going to turn you into a vampire. And I don’t think I can stand to do it with my soul in me. If you’d taken my soul just now, I could have done it. I could have fucked you numb and turned you and neither of us would have to _hurt.”_ His voice has a dark edge of fury, and it gets louder. “But that would be too fucking _kind_ for a prophecy, wouldn’t it? It’s going to make me sire you in some fucking terrible way, and every time I look at your eyes, I’ll have to remember what I took from you.” He rolls over on his side, away from her, and curls into a ball. She can barely make out his mumbled words. “And I’ll wish you’d just killed me right here.”

She runs.

* * *

Finn sits cross-legged on the bed and puts his earbuds back in. He tries again to meditate. He finds his breathing, picks it up like a thread and follows the oxygen in his lungs down into his bloodstream. The book says that the bloodstream will feel like a whole lot of things but that he has to find what everything has in common, the life that unites every cell.

He tries. He knows what life feels like. He’s tasted the difference between living and dead blood. He tries not to think about that; tries not to think about the man late at night by the corner store who will never get the smokes or mini-donuts or whatever he came to buy, or the girl with the swollen eye who will never fight back again. They were eaten up, and he is and isn’t the thing that ate them. But he remembers them, and the moment when their lives ended.

He brings his mind back. He’ll never do that again, or be that again. He’ll die first. So he reaches deep and tries to get his mind around it. The book says when he finds it, he should try to hold it, and then try to strengthen his hold, and it should feel like he’s squeezing his own throat.

 _Like grief,_ he thinks. _That choking feeling._ He remembers his father, his dream, the white light beneath his skin, and suddenly he has got a hold of something in his blood. There’s a snake of brightness through his veins, and it pulses in his mind, coiling, growing and shrinking. He tries to squeeze it, and see if he chokes, but it sparks and burns and he opens his eyes, gasping.

Green-white stars dance behind his lids for hours afterwards.

* * *

The bottom of the emergency stairwell is a very long way from the top. Kylo is alone with his thoughts for a long time, and when finally he isn’t, the clanging footsteps start very far above him. He could just slip out the door and away. But he feels heavy. He’s so hungry, and the man coming down the stairs smells of warm blood. He manages to get himself tidied and upright by the time the maintenance worker gets to the last step and frowns at him.

“Hey – ” the man in the orange vest starts to say, but then Kylo catches his eyes and wraps his thrall around him. It’s as easy as it was with Hux; as easy as it is impossible with Rey.

“There was nothing unusual in this stairwell,” he tells the man, who nods. Kylo could leave it at that, but he’s suddenly concerned. “Is there surveillance footage of this area?”

“Yeah,” the man answers easily. “They store it at Jay Street. Don’t check it except on weekends or if there’s an ask from the cops, though.”

Shit. “Today’s footage has caught you doing something very embarrassing,” he tells the man. “Maybe even illegal.”

“Oh, shit,” the worker breathes.

“You’ll do everything in your power to see to it that it’s erased before it can be checked.”

“Oh shit,” the man says again. “Oh shit oh shit. I gotta call my man in Security. Oh shit oh shit.”

As he slips out the door, Kylo adds the man’s desperate panic to his not-inconsiderable list of sins. But it would be worse to let somebody watch Rey like that.

“I don’t see how you can help being biased towards your Slayer,” Tai says. Tai is not there. Tai is dead. The Master of Ren killed him and Kylo killed the Master of Ren.

Kylo is very hungry. He looks for rats, but it’s early evening and they’re still timid. And he is supposed to be with Snoke.

He races to his apartment and washes every trace of Rey away. He can’t see himself in the mirror, of course, but for a moment he sees Uncle Luke, and Tai, and Tam Rivera, the girl who could have been Tai’s Slayer, all lined up in a row and staring at him.

Snoke is in a bad mood, which focuses itself on Phasma. He doesn’t like her protege, Kylo thinks. He wants to send someone else. That will be tomorrow. How did it get so late in the week? And if it works… 

It’s hard to concentrate. He feels hollow. He turns away from the furious void inside him and finds Uncle Luke sitting next to Snoke, a book open in his lap. "The Slayer embodies power,” Uncle Luke tells him. “Her Watcher must understand her power."

"It's demonic," he says impatiently, sick of this old argument. "Kuptar and Makubalu are clearly correct. Couldn't you smell it on her?"

"I lost a child when I lost my Slayer."

"And no child of yours could ever be a demon; is that it?"

“Guess he really doesn’t love you at all,” the Master of Ren says, twirling the knife as he smiles at Kylo.

“It’s not about that. You don’t know anything. It doesn’t matter. He’s a good Watcher.”

"If you must gibber to yourself," Snoke says coldly, "do it elsewhere. It's tiresome."

"Don't walk away from me," says Uncle Luke. But Uncle Luke walked away from him, because Uncle Luke was a good Watcher, and because Ben Szolo was a bad Watcher, Kylo Ren turns and goes.

* * *

Rey patrols until dawn. She finds only two vampires and leaves them both in piles of dust within moments. She books herself an additional furniture-assembly task on her phone so she doesn’t have to go home, then walks the idiot dogs with Rose in total silence. Rose respects the silence, but when the dogs are back in their UWS three-bedroom, she stops stock still in the hallway and looks evenly at Rey until Rey meets her eyes.

“Let’s go home now,” Rose says. “I have some frozen cheese bites I can heat up.”

Rey recognizes that this represents a sacrifice on Rose’s part. Rose has actual useful skills and gets paid for freelance coding work. She likes to work at the library; she _could_ just dump Rey on the sidewalk and get started immediately at the Morningside NYPL. Instead she’s offering to ride for an hour on the train with Rey. And then give her cheese bites.

“Thanks. I could use a cheese bite.”

Rose doesn’t say much on the ride home but she scrolls her timeline and shows Rey the good tweets until Rey’s just leaning over with her chin on Rose’s shoulder, idly watching the mis-aligned eggplants of the same Sheriff of Dick meme everyone is making scroll by. She doesn’t even notice when her own phone buzzes, just once. She doesn’t notice until they’re climbing out at Church.

**Scarface:** Today’s Friday  
  


She shoves her phone back into her jeans and tries to ignore what this could mean. She ignores it for blocks and blocks. She ignores it until Rose turns her back to take out the cheese bites.

**Me:** Are you threatening me you stupid asshole  
  


(Is he stupid? Is he an asshole? She doesn’t know; she just knows she doesn’t like this. She hates this.)

**Me:** Also Finn told me the only time somebody turned a slayer she leveled a city block in Tokyo so not sure y you think this’ll end well for you!!!  
  
**Scarface:** Kyoto  
  
**Scarface:** She didn’t have a watcher but you’ll have me  
  
**Scarface:** Who’s finn  
  
**Scarface:** Where did you meet him  
  
**Scarface:** Is he a watcher  
  
**Me:** He used to be a vampire but his gf and the slayer before me rescued him  
  
**Scarface:** That fucking asshole  
  
**Scarface:** I hate him  
  
**Me:** Youre an asshole  
  
**Me:** Why would you hate finn  
  
**Scarface:** Lucky  
  


She stares at this for a minute. “Somebody interesting?” Rose asks, pointedly.

“Hookup,” Rey mumbles. Rose’s eyebrows go up. Not in a good or approving way.

“You’re hooking up.”

“Kind of.”

“Are you sure – ”

“Not hooking up-hooking up; it’s complicated, okay?”

“I know you’re the Slayer but you can still get serial killered by an asshole with a gun and do you know how fucking pissed I’ll be if you end up on a white girl murder giggles podcast?”

“I’m not hooking up, okay. I lied. I’m texting a vampire informant.”

“Oh. Well okay then.”

**Scarface:** You have to stop them  
  
**Me:** What happened to texting like a Victorian novel huh  
  
**Scarface:** I can’t  
  
**Me:** Did somebody steal your phone?  
  
**Me:** Who am I talking to  
  
**Me:** If this is really Scarface tell me something only you would know  
  
**Scarface:** DONT CALL ME THAT  
  
**Me:** OK then  
  
**Scarface:** You have to stop them  
  
**Scarface:** I can’t  
  
**Me:** Stop who  
  


He sends her an address. It isn’t far away.

**Scarface:** Tonight  
  
**Me:** What is wrong with you???  
  
**Scarface:** What isn’t wrong with me  
  


Points made. And she could ask the same.

* * *

It’s weird how she starts to feel better once the sun goes down. Nobody wanted her fucking lightweight think-piece and it doesn’t matter to anything besides her bank account. Now she gets to save lives.

(And maybe kill something.)

She almost misses them; vampires usually wait until it’s a _little_ later but it’s barely five and these assholes are walking down the street like they have somewhere to be. She’s far enough behind them that she just catches their smell. They’re a mis-matched pair; one of them, a stubbly Latino in a long dark duster, walks with a faint swagger and wears well-worn fingerless gloves. The other, a white man who’s a bit of a unit, has a fancy puffer coat, skinny jeans, and a beard that looks like it’s been oiled. She’s kind of surprised they’re choosing to hunt together, but she’s not planning to interview them about their life choices.

The one in the puffer coat takes out a set of keys and lets them into a building. The building with the address Kylo gave her. Rey blinks. Vampires almost always hunt outside; hunting the hallways of a small, dingy apartment building has to limit their field a lot. Are they hoping to catch some poor tired bastard with a 9-to-5 in Manhattan between the stairwell and the door? That seems like a quick way to get a lot of attention from neighbors or family members. Vampires don’t usually like attention.

The door closes behind them before Rey can get her foot in it. She swears, and starts pressing buttons. No answer from the super’s apartment. Someone has to be expecting a visitor. Someone has to have a partner who might’ve left their keys at work. 

She’s pressed 25 out of 42 buttons when someone buzzes her in and she slips inside, walking as quietly as she can, following the demons’ smell.

They’re on the third floor, talking loudly in the hall. “You were given notice,” puffer coat is saying.

“We were only two days late,” a woman’s voice says. Rey stands on the top stair, with her back to the wall, looking down the hall. If they just turn a little to the left, they’ll see her. The woman has chin-length red hair and an expression that’s half outraged, half pleading. She’s standing in her doorway, gesticulating at the two men in the hall. “There’s a grace period.”

“You waived that in your lease,” duster says. His voice is ironical, with a faint stammer. “In exchange for a lower deposit.” He smiles, and his vampire face emerges, fangs bared. The woman gives a strangled shriek and takes a step back into her apartment. Rey pulls out her stake and prepares to administer a necessary vibe check for the guys in the hall. And then the vampires do something they should not be able to do.

They go into the apartment uninvited.

Rey’s chest feels tight. This is not okay. There are rules. People are safe in their homes. The world may be stalked by blood-sucking monsters who’ll kill you for fun or a snack, but once you’re home, you’re safe. They can’t come in uninvited. 

She runs for the apartment. They’ve shut the door behind them, but it hasn’t quite latched, and she burst through, heart pounding. The red-haired woman is frozen with fright in puffer jacket’s arms; the vampire in the duster is lunging after a Black woman in braids, who’s pelting him with books. Puffer jacket sinks his teeth in just as Rey comes in so she goes for him first, dragging his arm backwards and getting a satisfyingly nasty crunch from one of his fingers. The woman falls to the ground, punctured and bleeding but alive, and the other vampire turns from the woman with the books to face the action.

“Oooh,” he says lightly. “The Slayer.”

Puffer coat snarls and goes for her throat. She twists out of his reach and kicks him in the stomach; he doubles over, then dives for her legs. She somersaults forward, trying to pin him with her weight so she can stake him, but he’s a big boy, and he throws her off.

“DJ!” he huffs. “Some help here?”

The other vampire clucks his tongue. “Sorry about this one. Slayer… not really part of my brief. Good luck, though!”

He slips through the door. Making him one of the smarter vampires Rey’s encountered to date. His abandoned friend grabs for her stake-arm, but she throws an elbow check to the jaw and he staggers back. Under the puffer coat, he’s wearing a red tee shirt with a rose DSA logo.

“Seriously?” Rey cries. “What are you, chair of the Undead Caucus?”

“He was trying to _evict_ us,” cries the woman who was throwing books, looking up from where she’s kneeling beside her girlfriend, her hands pressed to the puncture wound.

“Aren’t you supposed to be eating the rich?” Rey asks him, forcing him back with a kick to the chest.

“I’d love to,” he snarls. “But the poor are so much more convenient.” He tries to throw himself off the wall at her like a wrestler coming off the ropes. She braces her feet and aims her stake, and he patters down around her as dark dust.

“Oh my God, sweetie, don’t move, don’t move,” the book-thrower pleads.

“Ow,” the red-head says. “Owww. Fuck. What the fucking fuck ow!”

“Take her to the E.R.,” Rey coughs. “Maybe don’t try to talk? On your way home, get garlic. As much as you can. Put it around your door. Wear it around your necks.” How did this happen? How could the vampires come in? “Did you know them? Did you invite them in some other time?”

“I’ve never seen them before in my life. They said they were from the management company. They said our rent was late and they were evicting us. There was a notice on our door this morning when we woke up but we thought it had to be a mistake. It’s only the 7th. We just moved in!”

The room is still full of cardboard boxes. Rey helps the women out into the hall, then turns back to read the notice that’s stuck to the door with packing tape.

ATTN: TENANTS OF #33, 46 CHURCH AVENUE, BROOKLYN, NY 11818

THIS IS A NOTICE THAT YOU HAVE BEEN EVICTED IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE TERMS OF YOUR LEASE, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY. YOUR BELONGINGS MUST BE REMOVED FROM THE RESIDENCE BY 5PM, OR THEY WILL BE REMOVED BY MANAGEMENT AT YOUR EXPENSE. FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH THIS NOTICE MAY RESULT IN LEGAL ACTION AGAINST YOU.

HUX MANAGEMENT COMPANY  
ON BEHALF OF OWNERSHIP

“They were evicted,” she says numbly to herself. _It wasn’t their home anymore. Their invitation didn’t matter._

“Snoke owns the building,” says a cracked, exhausted voice. Kylo Ren is crouched in a shadow at the end of the hall. He stands up slowly and takes a few steps towards her. In the white hallway lights he looks puffy-eyed and paler than she’s ever seen him. “DJ got away.” Rey starts to tell him that she noticed, but before she can, he snaps, “I know she knows. I mean he’ll tell Snoke. Or he’ll tell Phasma and she’ll tell Snoke. But now they’ll know it works.”

“What works? Evicting people?”

 _“Yes_ I _know_ what a liminal space is, Uncle Luke,” he says, in tones of deep annoyance, and crumples to the floor at her feet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> "Your mother said she was proud of you," she says. His head jerks up. "For the scar. She said vampires don't scar and so it meant you must have fought, and she was proud of you for that."
> 
> He laughs. He laughs in short, bitter grunts, and then he puts his face against his knees and cries.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Thanks this week to [Elizabethtudor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elizabethtudor/works) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/maryswraith)), for her charitable donation and cameo as a vampire-bitten tenant. And thanks as always to [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/Bombastique1)) for reading this not just once but at several stages. My thanks to everyone for their patience.


	11. Fluffy or Buster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> “She didn’t understand herself.”
> 
> “And you’d understand me.”
> 
> She says it skeptically, but his response is instantaneous and earnest. “Of course.”
> 
> She snorts, and turns her face away. “Right.” Something hurts, inside her, but something always does; so what.
> 
> Cool fingers come to rest gently over her heart. Just where it hurts the most. “I already do. We’re made of the same thing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "minor animal death" tag comes into play in this chapter. There is also some severely self-destructive thinking/behavior. Rey is having a hard time.

He’s heavy. Rey knew he was, but it’s one thing to yank him around and another thing to carry the entire 200+ pounds of him on her own supernaturally-strong-and-definitely-up-to-this-but-STILL shoulders for three avenue blocks.

“She’s the Slayer,” Kylo says proudly. “She smells so good.”

“I beg you to be less creepy about this,” she grunts, grabbing the handrail as his sudden attempt to move almost sends her down the subway stairs.

“Knew she would be. Shut up. Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I know it's my fault I didn't know it was a trick I thought... " He fades into silence for a moment, and the woman in the booth is frowning, but she doesn't stop Rey from taking him through the turnstiles like he was a duffel bag. (She does swipe twice.)

It is a Friday night, but it’s still early enough that a man sprawled mumbling on a woman’s shoulder gets a few looks. Rey answers with her best hostile glare. “You should take him off the train,” one girl says. “He’s gonna throw up.” Kylo laughs and laughs at that, and Rey doesn’t answer. The girl moves to the other end of the car. Kylo at least has the courtesy to stop talking about how she smells.

When they get to 14th St, the train is crowded enough that she can’t put him in a fireman’s carry for fear of hitting somebody with his big black-shod feet; she slings his arm around her shoulder and tries to get him to walk. It sort of works. She gets him through the transfer passage and almost onto the 1 before he suddenly twists his head around to focus on her.

“What are you doing?”

He isn’t speaking any louder than the mumble he’s been talking to himself the whole time in, but he is looking straight at her. And waiting for an answer. The train leaves without them. “I’m taking you to your mom to see if she knows how to fix what’s wrong with you.”

He starts to struggle, feebly but earnestly, and he does have weight going for him. “No. No. Don’t. She won’t. She’ll kill me. Don’t.”

“You’re _sick.”_

“I’m not _sick._ I’m… I’m _hungry.”_ The last word is so hoarse she can barely hear it; his jaw keeps working after he says it, but he doesn’t make another sound.

 _The hunger induces hallucinations._ Leah had told her, about the vampires who can’t claw themselves out of their graves. “When was the last time you ate?”

“You.”

“What about me now?”

“You gave me your blood.” She frowns at him. “In the garden. Under the bridge.”

“That was barely a drop; I just split my knuckles – that was _September.”_

He drops his head, like it’s too hard to hold it up, or too hard to look her in the eyes. “Can’t go back to rats after that. Couldn’t.”

“You eat _rats?”_ As if on cue, a particularly filthy specimen sniffs at a puddle between the rails. “You ate that archivist.”

“I tried. I drank some.” Rey remembers the messy stain of blood. “Felt sick.”

This stupid bastard. This big, stupid, murderous vampire bastard and his fucking soul. Fuck him. “Fine. I’ll feed you.”

He looks up, his human face melting away in an instant as he stares at her with yellow eyes. “You will?”

It’s almost funny, his demonic face and the childish excitement in his voice. _“Not like that!”_ she hisses, trying to cover his face with her hands. “Use your other face, you idiot! This is the subway!” But he won’t shift back and his face is too big and he keeps trying to sniff her wrists. And she doesn’t really want to look to make sure but she’s pretty sure he’s getting hard. She puts her jacket over his head and drags him onto the train.

It’s a long fucking ride, especially with a monster in the seat next to her acting like a puppy with a towel on his head while she tries to use the spotty wifi to search on her phone, and there’s at least a 60% chance this ends up on Gothamist. Sometime around 72nd St he stops thinking she’s going to let him bite her and starts to worry she’s taking him to his mother to be killed; that stops once they’ve made it a few stops past 110th, but then he goes back to arguing with people who aren’t there about things she doesn’t understand. Rey wonders briefly if @vampiremumbles might be a hit on Twitter.

At 207, where the train is elevated and a woman is preaching end-times in Spanish through a megaphone one block west, she drags him off the train and props him up in a corner just outside the emergency gate. “Can you stay here?” she demands, taking back her jacket. His human face is back, at least. “Just stay here and look normal and _not bite anybody?”_

He nods, exhausted, and she takes the steps down to the street three at a time and skids into the vivero minutes before they close. She spins around, taking in the cages full of chickens and ducks until her eye falls on what she needs.

“That one,” she says, pointing to the biggest of a row of grey rabbits.

“Okay,” the attendant says, scooping him out and hefting him. “Gonna be about eighteen, twenty dollars, okay?”

She’s already pulling out cash. Dogwalking pays in twenties and she has one left. “Oh – no,” she says impatiently as the attendant starts to carry the rabbit away. “You can just give him to me.”

He gives her a weary, shoulda-known look. “Not a pet store, mami. I can’t just sell you live rabbits.”

If they butcher the rabbit, they’ll drain the blood. “Fine,” she says, and grabs his wrist. He yells, and the rabbit squirms out his gloved grip. “Then this is a robbery. Sorry.”

She drops the twenty on the floor and bolts. Behind her the attendant yells, but nobody follows her as she dashes across the spiderweb of little uptown streets.

The rabbit kicks feebly. It smells terrible, and it’s very soft. It takes everything she has not to name it as she scrambles back up the stairs. Not a _real_ name, just something like Fluffy or Buster or – _stop it._ It was always going to be somebody’s dinner.

She waits out the flood of late commuters coming down the stairs, ignoring the look the vegetable guy is giving her as she tries to keep the rabbit inconspicuous. When she gets back to Kylo, he’s facing the wall, forehead pillowed on his arm. “Here,” she says, and he barely moves. “Here, I got you this.”

He turns, and she holds out the rabbit. He looks at her numbly.

“I’m not going to kill it for you,” she says impatiently, pushing it against him. “And I thought – I thought you’d like it better alive?”

He takes the soft little thing. She tries not to think about its grey fur, its life. Kylo makes an awful, painful sound, and turns away from her. The noise the rabbit makes is much worse. Rey looks away, across the tracks. _Estos son los ultimos dias,_ says the preacher’s amplified voice. _Somos pecadores._

“Yes,” he says after a little while. He’s still hoarse but his voice is subdued, and she can tell his fangs are gone, his demon face hidden away. “They taste better alive. Do you have any more?”

“Sorry,” she says. “You’ll have to rob the vivero yourself if you want more bunnies.”

“Right,” he says. “Right.”

She looks at him. He’s holding the rabbit’s corpse awkwardly, cradling it almost like a baby, and licking his lips over and over again. She could just leave him now, right? Now that she’s fed him. Now that she won’t have to tell Leah that she left him in a heap, tripping balls on his own empty stomach.

“Thank you,” he says. And God it’s fucking uncool that he has that voice. Like the sludge at the bottom of a cup of cocoa. The stuff you wait for with your tongue out as it rolls slowly down the side of the mug.

“You’re… welcome,” she says, stiffly. He looks down at the rabbit, and she blurts, “You know you’re absolutely nuts if you think your mother would kill you, right?”

He changes his hold on the dead animal completely; he seizes it by the neck and lets it dangle limply from his fist as he walks past her and down the stairs. “You underestimate her.”

Rey scoffs, following him. “What?”

He looks straight ahead as he crosses Broadway and climbs the stairs to the downtown-bound platform, his stiff neck keeping his head high. “My mother doesn’t hesitate in the cause. She’s sworn to protect the world, and you. She would kill me.”

“How can you _say_ that? Swipe me through; I swiped for you on the way from Brooklyn.” He swipes twice, still not looking at her. “She loves you.”

He walks down the platform like he’s trying to lose her, taking long, lunging strides, but she keeps up. “She loved her son,” he says, and Rey thinks his voice is thicker now. He throws the dead rabbit in the trash with too much force. “But he fucked up. He failed. And now there’s just me.”

“There’s no past tense about it,” Rey insists. He’s walked himself to the north edge of the platform – cornered himself against the black iron barrier. There’s a shocking expanse of dark night sky visible over his shoulder. The wind shifts a little, carrying the rank smell of the vivero to them, and he slumps his weight against the railing. He may be coherent, but a rabbit isn’t _that_ much bigger than a New York rat. “Do you need more food?”

“No,” he says, but he closes his eyes. The moonlight and the yellow sodium lights on the platform pick out the dark line down his face.

“I’m sorry I called you Scarface,” she says softly. He keeps his eyes closed, and slowly slides down the barrier until he’s sitting, back rigid as the iron. “You seemed really upset. About that.”

“It’s nothing. I shouldn’t have let it affect me.”

"Your mother said she was proud of you," she says, quietly. His head jerks up, eyes opening. "For the scar. She said vampires don't scar and so it meant you must have fought, and she was proud of you for that."

He laughs. He laughs in short, bitter grunts, and then he puts his face against his knees and cries. She can see the lights of the train pulling in to 215. She stoops down beside him. “What is it?”

He’s shaking again, laughing. “They didn’t want me. I wasn’t the one they wanted.”

It’s not like she’s ever seen a vampire get sired, but she’s pretty sure it doesn’t happen by accident. “What are you talking about?”

He drags his thumb down the scar in a slow scraping motion. “I didn’t get this in a fucking _fight.”_ For a moment he just shakes, and then he speaks again. “I had a vision. Uncle Luke had a vision. We thought that meant it was serious. That we should both go. But it was a trap. False visions, from the Order of Ren. They made me think Tai was in danger. Tai was – Tai cared about me. I cared about him. I didn’t think his girl would ever be the Slayer, but even Potentials have power in their blood, and I thought – I thought they were going to sacrifice her and he’d die for her. And Uncle Luke thought they had a ritual that would bring a thousand demons from hell. He was a good Watcher. He cared about the world. About hell. I just didn’t want them to hurt Tai.”

The platform rumbles, and he goes quiet, hiding his face as the train arrives. He doesn’t seem inclined to get on it. Rey waits beside him, watching a few unconcerned people with Target bags get off the train, headed for the stairs. _Next stop Dyckman,_ says the conductor, and the platform shakes again, and then, after a while, after it’s quiet, he speaks again.

“They wanted Uncle Luke. He was the legend. The Watcher of Buenos Aires, they called him. Helped Enfys Nestor stop the Crimson Dawn and defeat the Vampire Emperor. Killed the Dathomirian demon that killed his Slayer. Had the Sight. Taught at the Academy. Senior Member of the Watchers’ Council. He was the one they wanted to turn. I was just his nephew.” His voice is wet, and he sniffs, and shakes again, and makes himself stop. “The Master of Ren killed Tai as soon as we walked in. He was trying to cast a spell to protect his girl. Tamara Rivera. They grabbed us. The broke his neck and drank her and they just dropped them. Left them on the floor. They had Anaquin’s blade. The Master cut himself and offered the blood to Uncle Luke. He wouldn’t take it. He was a good Watcher. They put the blade against my face.”

Rey sucks air through her teeth, and he laughs again. “They thought Uncle Luke would let them turn him. To make them stop. Because I was his sister’s son. They didn’t understand.”

“Leah told me it was cursed,” Rey interrupts. “That knife. That it caused incredible pain to whatever it touched.” Her eyes follow the long line of the scar. Down his face. Under his chin. The unbroken line no casual blow could make. “They tortured you.”

“I don’t remember much of it,” he says dully. “They’d stop sometimes. Ask Uncle Luke if he’d changed his mind. Pick up where they left off. And then – then they stopped. Told me he was dead. Said I’d do. Offered me blood. And I took it.”

Rey’s heart is speeding. “Leah said – Leah said people who touch that knife don’t remember their own _names._ Just from _touching_ it.”

“I’m a Watcher. I took an oath. I should have remembered how to die.”

Rey reaches out and touches that long line on his cheek. He flinches away. “It seems like your uncle could have remembered a little sooner,” she says scathingly. “If he was just going to do it anyway. How far down does this go?” It disappears under his shirt. She’s never seen him without his tidy buttoned shirts, with their high, folded collars.

“He must have thought there was another way. Thought someone might come help us, or that he could trick them. Cast a spell.”

“But he didn’t. He didn’t help you, or save you; he let you be tortured, and then he died, and now you’re trying to tell me you _failed? You_ failed?”

His eyes blaze and he scrambles to his feet. “I did fail. There can’t be exceptions. There can’t be slack. You keep your oath or you don’t. And I didn’t. I failed. And I put all my learning, all my visions, in service of the powers of darkness.”

“And then your father gave you back your soul!”

“I’d already told Snoke that how to summon the Starkiller demon. I may as well have killed Faith Lehane and Wesley Wyndam-Price myself.”

“But you can _stop;_ that’s what I keep telling you.”

“I’m a demon. Red pawns don’t turn white by wishing, and they can’t walk off the board.” He meets her eyes now. “But I can still play the same game.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“When you’re a vampire – ” she takes a step back, but he isn’t deterred. “You’ll be stronger. Twice as strong as you are now. Faster. Stealthier. No vampire in the world would stand a chance against you. No demon.”

“That Japanese Slayer – ”

“Okiku’s Watcher was dead. She hunted at random, and killed humans when she couldn’t find vampires. I’ll make sure you can always find more demons to kill. You save people every night, Rey. You could save so many more.”

“She staked herself, Finn said.”

“She didn’t understand herself.”

“And you’d understand me.”

She says it skeptically, but his response is instantaneous and earnest. “Of course.”

She snorts, and turns her face away. “Right.” Something hurts, inside her, but something always does; so what.

Cool fingers come to rest gently over her heart. Just where it hurts the most. “I already do. We’re made of the same thing.”

She can’t look at him. If she looks at him he’ll see her crying, and then what will she do? “Demons and death?”

“And emptiness,” he says. He doesn’t move his hand. “There’s a hollowness in you. Like there is in me.” The platform starts to hum and rumble. The train is coming. “I don’t _want_ this for you, Rey. But prophecies are like winter. You can’t stop them. You can’t run. All you can do is be ready.”

He kisses her. He opens her mouth with his, and his hand is gentle as it slides up to circle her throat. His fingers brush the nape of her neck and the kiss is soft; he tastes like blood and fear but his lips are tender.

Brakes hiss, the two-tone chime sounds, and Kylo boards the train with one long backwards step. _This is 207th Street,_ says the conductor. “This street’s packed with nightclubs,” he says, holding up a hand when she starts to follow him. “Nightclubs draw vampires. I have to go back to Snoke. And you’re not strong enough to fight him.”

“You don’t _have – ”_

 _Dyckman Street, 200, next._ “If you were a vampire, you could kill him. You could kill them all,” he says. The chime sounds again. Rey hesitates. His dark eyes are unreadable. “Thank you for the rabbit. I could smell your hands on it.”

She lets it leave without her. He’s right about the neighborhood. By 3AM she’s killed another three vampires.

* * *

“That is… concerning.” Leah wraps her hands together and props them under her chin, elbows on her dining room table. “Worrying. Extremely bad. How does he have the power to evict them?”

“Kylo said he owned the building.” Finn thinks there’s something weird to the way Rey says it, the way she looks at Leah from underneath her eyebrows.

“Snoke has been dead since the 17th Century. How can he have a legal personhood for the State of New York to recognize in a real estate title?”

“And how is he getting around tenant protections?” Poe asks. “Nobody should be getting evicted in the first week of the first month after they moved in.”

Rey shrugs, and Rose frowns down at the eviction notice on the table. “What about the management company? Do they know they’re working for a vampire?”

“All excellent questions,” Leah says, frowning. “Though none of them strike at the root of the problem. The threshold magic which keeps vampires out is ancient. How can it be manipulated by something like this? How can we stop it?”

Rey says, “If I can get a building key I can check for eviction notices.”

“I do not want Snoke to be able to predict your location. You are phenomenally accomplished for a Slayer in her first year, but you have only a few months of experience and I don’t want you facing him.” Finn sees Rey blush bright red.

“I’ll go,” Poe volunteers.

“Everything I _just_ said goes _triple_ for you.”

“We can educate the tenants,” Finn suggests. “Tell them to buy garlic. And does the beans thing work? Nobody ever tried it on me.”

“Beans thing?” Rey asks. Her cheeks are still red.

“One traditional method of vampire deterrence is to pour beans or seeds on the ground,” Leah tells her. “The vampire will allegedly be seized by a compulsion to count them individually. The research is inconsistent on whether it actually works. It might be worth trying.”

“We’ll warn them. Poe, will you come with us?” Rose asks. “Finn and I don’t speak good Spanish.”

“I speak _some_ Spanish,” Finn protests.

She gives him a look, eyebrows raised. “Oh yeah? How do you say ‘landlord?’”

No fair. That wasn’t in Spanish 101 _or_ 102\. That he remembers. “It’ll come to me.” He purses his lips, hoping it will, and she smirks. “It wasn’t my concentration, okay?”

“Yeah, maybe some of them will want to discuss the subtitles on Princess Tutu. Poe, how do you say ‘my boyfriend is a fucking weeb?’”

“Mi novio es un fucking weeb,” Poe says, with beautiful enunciation, and Finn gives him the finger.

Leah breaks in dryly. “I’m glad you’ll have several languages covered between you. By all means, do try to educate the tenants, and good luck convincing them they’re being threatened by vampires. I’ll do some research; there’s a spell for revoking invitations, and it may be useful here. Feel free to take the rest of the cookies. Rey, if you’ll stay for a few moments?”

They push their chairs back from the table; Rose takes two cookies, and Poe waits to see if Finn or Rey are reaching for the plate before he takes all he can carry with a cheeky smile. Finn hesitates for a second, moving slowly, letting Rose and Poe get ahead of him. “Could I – talk to you for a second?” he asks Leah in a low voice. “I know you wanna talk to Rey and it’s not like urgent or anything but I was just wondering.”

“Of course.” She walks back from the airy space of the dining and living room spaces, and he follows her a few steps down the hall that leads to the private rooms. “Is something wrong?”

He swallows. “You can do the thing, right? The meditation.”

“Yes.” Her face is serious. “Obviously I’ve never followed the entire process, but I’ve trained.”

“Do you ever – when you get down to your blood and you’re looking for your life and – do you ever find something – else?” She frowns, and he licks his lips, wondering what he’s about to tell her and if he’ll regret it. “Something kind of – green?” He makes a gesture with his hands, trying to convey the way it pulsed, expanding and contracting.

“No,” she says, with a slow shake of her head. “No, I can’t say I ever have.”

“And you’ve never heard of anything like that? You don’t know what it might be?”

She opens her mouth, and then closes it again, tilting her head. “I can’t say that no Watcher has ever died and returned to life. Resurrection is rare, but not unheard of. Your circumstances, however – the way you were returned to life – Mohra demon blood is green, isn’t it?”

He blinks. He hadn’t looked. All he remembered was the fight, hating the Slayer for holding him down when he wanted to grab Rose by her hair and – he doesn’t want to remember what he wanted when he was a demon. And then there was pain, and the dizzying rush of his heart thumping into life.

“Mohra blood is regenerative by nature. There isn’t really a reason to suppose that it would leave your body once you were revived. And it’s interfering with your death meditation?”

“Yeah. I try to do the – squeeze thing. The part that’s supposed to choke you? And I don’t really feel anything.”

Leah straightens her head, and turns her face away. “It’s possible that the demon’s blood has done more than bring you back to life. If it’s still in circulation in your bloodstream – it’s possible you’ve acquired its regenerative powers completely. Have you been injured since you were resurrected?”

“No.” He’s been careful, and Rose has made him be even more careful than that. He hasn’t so much as nicked himself shaving.

“I don’t want to say anything that will make you reckless or get you hurt, Finn.”

“But you’re saying I might be – what, immortal?”

She sighs. “I don’t know, Finn. All I know is, if you made it that far in the meditation without viscerally feeling that your life was in danger, there is definitely something unusual. I can do some reading – ”

“I didn’t mean to make work for you – ”

“I’d rather read than hear you were hurt in some foolhardy experiment. It may not mean you’re immortal. It may actually be detrimental to your health; you’re a human being with a demon’s blood inside you.”

“No experiments,” he says, crossing his heart.

“Good,” she says, turning back to face him, and her frown hasn’t lightened. “You should be well, Finn. You should be happy.”

On the subway, Rose cuddles against him. “I’m sorry I teased you. We can watch anime when we get home if you want.”

“Subs?” he asks, wrapping his arm around her and feeling her soft and warm against him.

“If you promise not to keep telling me about which pronouns are ‘affectionate diminutives,’ yeah.”

“Deal,” he says, and kisses her hair. But after they’ve bickered back and forth between _Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans_ and _Yuri on Ice!_ and settled on _Little Witch Academia,_ there’s a moment of quiet, and he remembers his dream, and the green-white light pouring out of his veins.

“Are you okay?” Rose asks frowning.

“Just cold,” he says, and tucks his hand between her sweater and her jacket.

* * *

When Kylo comes in, Hux is a crumpled heap on the floor and Snoke is wiping his mouth. His nose – what’s left of it after centuries of life as a vampire – twitches as he looks up.

“Is that the Slayer I smell?”

“Yes, Master.” He was late to begin with, and the thought of washing her off is unbearable. The acrid taste of the rabbit lingers in the back of his throat, but her warm, spicy-sweet smell overwrites everything else. “I saw her leaving the building and I followed her.”

“I told you to wait.”

“I had a vision,” he says flatly, and prepares to be punished.

Phasma mutters, “Hallucination, more like,” but Snoke just sighs.

“The Slayer _is_ presenting unanticipated difficulties. DJ tells me she saw them enter the apartment. Followed them in.”

“Yes, Master.”

“She spoke to you?”

“She wanted to know how it was possible.”

“I see. I see.” Snoke nudges Hux’s corpse with his foot. “Someone take him out and bury him. If he isn’t strong enough to get through the dirt when he rises, I don’t want him.” He turns back to Kylo. “Did you only exchange words with the Slayer?”

“No.” _Blood. Secrets. A kiss._ “A few blows.”

“But you didn’t kill her?” There’s an edge to Snoke’s voice.

“I thought you wanted me to wait. Master.”

“I do. Or I did.”

“She’s getting stronger,” he says. Because if Snoke tells him to bring her in tomorrow, what will he do? And because she is getting stronger.

“I see,” Snoke says, and leans back in his chair, watching Hux’s lifeless body be carried out. Kylo was never buried, himself; he woke up in the chair he died in, with three dead bodies at his feet and the Master of Ren standing by. He watches the dead man go, and wonders if he’ll make it through the dirt.

* * *

Rey can’t hold still, and Leah indulges her, letting her move restlessly through the apartment as she talks. Rey tells her everything – well, almost everything. She figures Leah can probably guess what’s missing, from her questions about Angel and his curse, but that doesn’t mean she needs to provide an itemized list of sex acts. He still has his soul; that’s all her Watcher needs to know.

“And he said there was a prophecy, which, like, he mentioned before,” Rey says, running her fingers through the dust that lies thick on a low shelf. “And he said it was about him turning me into a vampire. That Snoke thought it was about opening a Hellmouth because it said a ‘terrible mouth’ would open but that Snoke was wrong and it was a mouth like an actual mouth. And he said he was going to turn me into a vampire and it was just a question of when and how; he said prophecies were like winter and the only thing you could do was get ready for them.”

“Do you remember the exact wording?” Leah asks.

“Uhh.” Rey pauses in her wandering, toying with a small, blunt dagger. “‘The Watcher will fall, and he will kill two fathers, and… ’ some stuff about blood and death? And then it ended with ‘a new and terrible mouth will open.’”

“Hmm,” Leah says, looking at her clasped hands. “Hmmm.”

“It wasn’t from fighting,” Rey blurts. “The scar on his face.” Leah’s head jerks up. “They tortured him. Because they thought his uncle would agree to be made a vampire to make them stop. They had that magic knife, and they cut him with it. It’s all the way down his face and under his chin and down his neck. His uncle wouldn’t turn, so after he died they decided to try him. He says he doesn’t even remember it.”

All the light has gone out of Leah’s eyes. They are wide and dull. No part of her moves except for her chest, jerking up and down under the buttons of her plain white shirt as she breathes. After a moment her hands slowly unfold, and come up to cover her eyes. Rey sees that her own hand is clutched around the blunt dagger like she’s ready to stab someone. She drops it with a clunk on the shelf, and Leah’s hands slam flat on the table. Rey has a brief glimpse of her eyes, brown and blazing, before she covers them again.

“Every time,” she says. “Every time I think I understand, and I’ve grieved, and it’s over. Something comes and I’m back where I began. Like the first minute. And I have to begin again.”

“I’m sorry,” Rey says softly.

“Ben. Luke. Han. That poor boy, and the little girl. It’s unbearable. You said it’s all down his neck? How could Luke – ” She breaks off. _I’m sorry,_ Rey wants to say again. Before, she’d thought her son had failed. Does it help, to move some of the blame to her brother? Does it hurt less? It doesn’t look like it does. _But she needed to know._

Leah is still sitting there with her eyes covered. She’s so still, and Rey is so restless; she picks up Leah’s mug as silently as she can, crosses to the kitchen and clicks the burner on, lifting the kettle to make sure there’s still water in it. Leah doesn’t uncover her face but she stirs a little at the sound.

“I’m lucky, really,” she says, and Rey turns towards her, not sure she heard right. _Lucky_ isn’t the word she’d use. But Leah goes on. “This grief – it feels like nothing anyone could feel could be worse than this. But people feel like this all the time. They lose their friends, lovers, family. Children. You killed four vampires last night, Rey. You saved at least five people. And their mothers will not have to feel like this, because you’re a good Slayer, and it is my honor to be your Watcher.”

As she says it, she folds her hands on the table again, but Rey can’t see her face because her vision is too blurred to see any further than the kettle. But Leah doesn’t seem to need anything from her. She just waits as Rey pours the hot water, and thinks.

She puts the mug back beside Leah. “He said – he said if I were a vampire I would still want to kill vampires. And I’d be way better at it.”

Leah’s eyes snap to hers. “Oh? And he thinks it would be worth it, does he? A little human sacrifice for the sake of the greater good.”

It’s not like Rey didn’t think about it, as she was hunting the vampires who haunted the clubs last night – who would she eat, if she were a vampire? Whose life would end because of her? “Maybe I could just eat – rabbits – or – ”

Leah’s hand seizes her urgently by the arm. “Rey. I’m talking about _you._ You have a human life, and a human soul, and I will not lay you down on the altar in the name of _efficiency._ Even in this cause.”

“But if I could be better,” Rey says confusedly.

“No,” Leah says firmly. “What we ask of Slayers is barely forgiveable as it is.”

Rey remembers the conversation she overheard, between Giles and Leah. _We fight beside them. Sometimes die for them._

_Not as often as they die for us._

* * *

“Thanks?” The white woman in #26 has a Southern accent. Her smile as she takes the garlic is friendly, but there’s bafflement in her blue eyes behind her black-framed glasses. “That’s very… neighborly of y’all.”

“Remember to keep it by the door,” Rose repeats, frantically upbeat, as part of their goodbye. After the door’s close and the piano music they’d interrupted resumes, her face turns gloomy. “It’s absolutely going in the cupboard, isn’t it.”

“Better than the lady in 56,” Finn says. “I swear I could see little garlic breads dancing in her pupils.”

“I mean, it kind of seems like the simplest thing to do would just be to just give them Rey’s number and say to call her if they get an eviction notice, but they might think she’s just a legal aid lawyer or something?”

“Maybe we should get some actual legal aid lawyers,” he suggests.

“Lawyers aren’t going to help if there are vampires at your door as soon as the sun sets.”

No lies detected, but. “What if Rey’s out in Astoria or something, though, like, fucking up some guy trying to raise a demon army?”

Rose worries her lip, and knocks on the door of #25. Nobody answers. The door to #24 opens, and somebody with shoulder-length 3c curls emerges. Rose waves and calls out, trying to flag them down, but Finn sees the purple wire of earbuds over their collar and he’s not surprised when they walk away without turning. She sighs. “I guess… they get eaten by vampires then? I mean, it happens, right? Rey can’t be everywhere all the time.”

“Maybe they could call us,” Finn mumbles.

Rose turns grey. “You are _not_ risking your life again.”

 _But what if I’m not risking it?_ he wants to ask. _What if I can’t die?_ He knocks at #23.

* * *

Rey books a furniture assembly gig first thing that morning. It’s a big one, with 17 items to be assembled, and she congratulates herself for being the hungry early bird who gets the worm. She congratulates herself through all the finicky bits that are made difficult by the couple’s toddler playing with the bolts (they give her a cookie in apology), and through the sticky bits that need her to bring out her personal toolbox, and she congratulates herself all the way until she checks her balance, and sees that they’ve penalized her.

She clicks through, incredulous, because she did that shit _perfectly,_ and finds that the note on the penalty, which is $20, reads: _Ate food intended for the household._

They charged her $20 for a cookie they offered her.

She rages about it to Rose as they walk the idiot dogs, and Rose rages back about fucking tech bros making incentives for people to screw you over and getting called fucking geniuses, and it’s honestly a relief to her feelings, at least until Bunsen slips her collar somehow and they have to chase her practically the entire length of Riverside Park. Well, Rey chases her; Rose takes Beaker and Petri so Rey can devote way more of her Slayer speed than she should have to to catch one small dog whose only superpower is being stupid enough to run over at least a dozen of the hundred little cliffs that make up the slope of the park.

When they finally arrive back at the owners’ apartment, scratched and muddy, half-rotten November fallen leaves in Rey’s hair, the three little morons dash over the hardwood floors in search of their water dish. The owner, Dr. Aphra, has her bag and her shoes on, and she clicks her tongue as she opens her wallet. “Oh,” she says. “I’m _so_ sorry; I’m _flat_ out of cash and I have to run off to class right now.”

“I’ve got Venmo and CashApp,” Rose says. “Rey has Venmo too, so I can pay her if you can pay me.”

“Sorry; I only use my bank’s app. I’ll have to pay you next time.”

“If you leave it with Leah I can pick it up tonight,” Rey says, thinking with dismay about how close they are to being completely out of toilet paper. Rose and Finn are wizards with the rice and beans, too, but she eats too much of their food already, and does she have any ramen left? Is one of the eggs hers? She feels a twinge at the thought of the twenty she left on floor of the vivero.

Dr. Aphra makes a face. “Last time I went to Leah’s place, she gave me a twenty minute lecture on the disposal of an object _I_ found. I’ll just pay you next time,” she says breezily. “Don’t worry about it. Excuse me – undergrads are the _worst.”_

Rey and Rose are left standing in the hall, making appalled faces at each other. “Ugh. And there is like a two hundred percent chance that egg-looking thing on her table is demonic, by the way,” Rose says.

Rose goes to the library to code and Rey tries to put the toilet paper on her card at Westside Market. The card is declined. Rey takes one of every cheese sample, and makes a slow circuit of the market, looking at her phone and thinking. All the assembly gigs for the rest of the day are taken. But it’s not that long until sunset. She remembers Poe telling her that vampires carry stolen money they take from their victims sometimes.

She texts Leah to ask if there’s anywhere in particular she wants her to patrol tonight, and when she doesn’t get an answer, she decides just to… stroll. Follow her nose. Stay in the neighborhood in case Leah wants to see her. (Maybe come back for more cheese samples after the shift change.)

She wanders through the Cathedral gardens and looks at the wall display on Cathedral Parkway about farm workers living without running water in California. It should be a cure for self-pity but she just feels worse, just a faint ambient wretchedness like a ringing in her ears. The sun goes down. She sniffs the cold air, and heads east.

Morningside Park has a little apron of flat (flat-ish) ground, with grass and playgrounds. It rises into a tangled knot of trees and stairs and beds of shrubs and flowers, moss-covered stony look-out points and paths that end nowhere. That’s where Rey goes, taking the slate stairs two at a time in both directions. She can smell demon, but she doesn’t feel like she’s running after something; she feels like she’s running from something, so busy hiding from something that she’s never looking anywhere long enough –

She almost crashes into the vamp. She’s coming up from a sharp bend in the stairs as Rey’s going down, and there’s no mistaking what she is, even with her human face on. It’s a bland face, amiable and a little round, and Rey hits her square in the face, trying to break the thinner human bones, stun the soft human brain, before the demon can take over the game. But the vampire roars and lunges, fangs out, and she’s back at the same game of keeping it at bay until she can get under its arm.

Rey draws it out, feeling the vampire’s pockets while she avoids its blows. She fishes out a handful of cash with a small spike of triumph boosting her adrenaline. It lunges for her, she dodges; it’s kicks, she blocks; it tries to grab her hair and she grabs its arm. They all try the same tricks; they all end the same way. Dark grey dust. She’s dusting it off herself and her small score when she sees the body, facedown in a flower bed two flights of stairs below her.

She should just leave, but she doesn’t. She walks slowly down to him. The fallen man has curling hair, dark blond and maybe starting to go thin. His jeans are shabby, slouchy, and his canvas Converse knockoffs are a cheerful kelly green. Books peek out from a satchel next to him. She doesn’t need to touch him to know that he’s still warm. His wallet is on the ground about a foot away.

She looks down at her handful of cash. Fourteen dollars. She was too late to save him, too busy feeling aimless and miserable while the vampires were up and busy. And so now she has fourteen dollars, and he is dead. His face is hidden among the broken winter flowers, but she can see his university ID through the transparent window of his splayed wallet. Beaumont Kin. A patchy beard, an awkward smile.

She throws the money on the ground.

* * *

Kylo’s on his bed, not asleep. He doesn’t know what time it is; he always loses track, lost in hopeless fantasy or the endless round-and-round of the same thoughts. Just then its fantasy, reverie – thinking of the way she smells, trying to name every strand of her scent. He could almost swear she was really there when she crashes through the blacked out window in a deadly blaze of sunlight.

“If I let you do it,” she demands, as he scrambles back on the bed, trying not to cower from the sudden flood of sun, “I could kill them all? You said I could kill them all.”

“Yes,” he says, after the moment it takes him to process what she’s asking. “If you were a vampire, you could kill them all.”

“Okay,” she says. His eyes are adjusting; he can see the dark circles under hers. He can see the way her shoulders are pulled in, the way she huddles in her leather jacket like she’s standing in a rainstorm. He knows what she’s saying, when she doesn’t say anything else. She just stands there, waiting and shivering. His poor little matchgirl, with the fearsome strength and skill to fight the forces of darkness. The chosen one, with her dreadful destiny, who he’s meant to guard and guide and live and die for. His one girl in all the world.

She looks so tired and sad.

“Come here,” he says, and she jerks back, deeper into the sunlight. If she’s got cold feet, who can blame her? But she understands, now. She sees what he sees. She’s come here to get what he can give her. Pleasure and power and deadly eternal life as something terrible and bright.

He’ll take care of her. He’ll make sure it happens the right way, that it doesn’t hurt.

“You’ve made a lot of noise,” he says softly. “This building is full of vampires. You don’t want them to come in here, do you?” She shakes her head exhaustedly. “You made a lot of noise, and if they wake up, they might smell you. But I can take care of it.” He holds his arms out. “Come here.”

She comes to him. It’s November; cold clings to her jacket at he slips it off her. He cups his hand behind her head, greedily digging his fingers into her hair, and kisses her. He wants to lick the winter sunlight off her skin.

“We can cover up your smell,” he says softly, and pushes her shirt up until she lifts her arms and lets him take it off. “We’ll cover it all up, so nobody who walks by will smell you.” But the smell of her only gets stronger in his nose as he sees more and more of her. There’s a soft blur of peach fuzz to her skin. His mouth waters. He mutters little coaxing nothings to her as he works open the button on her jeans and shushes the buzz of the zipper with his thumb. “Come on. There we go.”

She lets him undress her, shifting to ease his way, something more than pliant. She doesn’t help him undress, but as he unbuttons his shirt, she strokes his chest, finding the end of his scar with her fingertips. His skin burns where she touches him, like she was something holy.

* * *

She doesn’t feel numb anymore. She was worried she would, that the last thing she’d ever feel would be misery in her heart and nothing in particular in her body. He runs his hands over her and it could almost feel covetous. She could almost believe that all he wants is her, and not the thing he’s going to make her.

“I know,” he says, and his big hands are clumsy as he lays her down onto the bed. “You had a hard night, didn’t you? Out killing monsters.”

His fingers slip between her legs and she shivers. “Cold? Of course. Here.” His fingers press between her lips, and she remembers her fingers in his mouth, his cock heavy on her tongue. “Just to warm them up a bit,” he says, stroking her tongue. His fingers are huge. She knew, but still.

His other hand cradles the back of her neck, his arm beneath her shoulders. When he touches her again, his fingers are warm and wet and precise. She squirms in his arms, legs tensing, and the hand on the back of her neck tightens, holding her still. He gives her longer, slower strokes that make her back arch as he pets her clit.

“See?” he whispers as she licks her lips and tries not to whimper. “I can take care of you.”

“Take care of myself,” she says through her teeth. She rolls her hips to press into his fingers harder.

“I know.” He kisses the edge of her jaw. “Take care of yourself. Take care of everybody. You’re always the hero, who kills the monster and saves the damsel in distress.”

She shuts her eyes. Not always. She doesn’t always save them. That’s why she’s here.

“But now you’re in the demon’s lair, aren’t you?” His fingers between her legs are demanding and the hand on the back of her neck is a clamp. “Now you’re in danger. But you wanted this, didn’t you? Asked for it.” She whines in the back of her throat, kicking out as he pushes her closer and closer. She can feel his hard cock as he holds her to him. His fingers are so thick. “Fuck. I can hear your heart. Look at you. So scared. So pretty. Come on, pretty girl; the monster wants to make you come.”

She wails as it hits her, and the hand that had held her neck slaps down over her mouth.

“Shhhh,” he says, rubbing her gently through the aftershocks. “This place is full of monsters, pretty girl. They’d all want to hurt you, and I don’t want to share.”

Her chest heaves. She could bite his hand. She could twist and slam her elbow into his throat. She lies there trembling under his hands, letting him wring more shocks out of her with the faintest little brush of his fingers.

When he rolls her over facedown on the bed, she does start to push him off, but he stops her with a heavy hand on the small of her back. “No,” he says, in a different, rawer voice. “I don’t want you to see me like this now.”

But she hears it anyway, the inhuman crumpling of his face as his fangs emerge.

He spreads her legs apart, big palm smoothing over the skin of her thighs. He’s too good at this; he fondles her ass like it’s something he’s craved all his life, and she already came but she’s just getting hotter and wetter. He groans.

“Someone will smell you.” His weight is over her now, and she can feel his cock nudging between her lips. “Can’t let them smell you.” He pushes in just a little, and she’s taken him before but she still gasps at the way it splits her. “They’ll want to hurt you.” Another small thrust, just a little deeper. “Any demon would. So sweet.” He thrusts again, and it dimly occurs to her that he’s copying the way she’d pushed herself down on him. “Warm.” Inch by inch. “Good.” The word is a grunt and she grunts too, against his palm. “Fuck. Who wouldn’t want to break you?”

He’s curved close over her now, and she can feel his arms flex around her as he starts to really fuck her. “So pretty,” he sighs against her ear, against the back of her neck. “So precious. My Slayer. Mine.”

Then she feels it – the scrape as he lays his cold, sharp teeth against her neck. He doesn’t bite down; he keeps his mouth open against her throat. His tongue to her skin. Breathing her in like she could get him high. Every deep shove of his cock jostles her just a little against the points of his fangs, and her heart speeds even faster, a hummingbird pulse to match the shuddering that’s building again inside her.

She squeezes down, whimpering, and he groans; his teeth get tighter and his thrusts get rougher. She’s caught, held, and he’s so deep inside her she can’t tell where he stops, she can just feel the burn of his cock inside her as he fucks her down into the bed. She screams into his hand as she comes, and he gives a last brutal thrust, holding himself inside her as his teeth clamp down. She gasps. But they’re blunt, they’re his harmless human teeth that sting deliciously but don’t even break her skin. And when she rolls his unresisting body off her, it’s his brown human eyes that are leaking tears.

She touches his cheek.

“I can’t, Rey,” he says hoarsely. “Even when I can’t see your eyes. I can’t.”

“Your soul?” she asks, baffled. She knows he came. The evidence is dripping down her leg.

“It hurts.” His voice is dull. “Just hurts. The bathroom’s through there, if you want it.”

She tries to just concentrate on physical motions and what she needs to do next, but standing under the shower, she can’t help it. She felt terrible when she came here. So fucking sick of the fucking world she was ready to pull the emergency break. Ready to put all her chips on one bad chance, bet it all on the black and hope it meant ruin for them and not for her. But instead the house has politely refunded her and told her the casino’s closed for the night.

Her big desperate, angry move, and it all fizzled out. She touches the dark bruise on her neck. It’ll be gone in a few hours.

When she goes back in, naked and damp from the shower, he hasn’t really moved. He has his weird long chin propped on his arm and he watches her from the bed as she hunts up the clothing he scattered. It’s not a predatory gaze. It’s observational, distant. An astronomer’s look. It makes her angry enough to say what she’s thinking. “So, what? My pussy isn’t good enough to make you happy?”

“It’s not your fault, Rey.”

Great. Real consoling. “Not my fault I’m not good enough? Does it have to be a blonde teenage virgin or something?”

“I don’t know,” he says, and she kind of wants to throw up as she puts on her underwear. Her grand, furious surrender, and it’s not enough. She’s not enough to make anyone happy.

“Great. Sorry.” Where’s her bra? Was she wearing a bra?

“I’ve never felt anything that good in my entire life,” he says, and she looks up. His dark eyes are fixed on her, and he looks desperate. “I don’t know why it didn’t work. If it didn’t work, I don’t know how to get rid of it. How can I do it if I still have it?” He’s almost whimpering. “Rey? What do I do?”

“What do _you_ do? What do _I_ do? I can’t save them; I’m trying, but I’m not good enough and it’s so bad – ” her voice rises and he jumps up and puts his hand over her mouth again.

“I don’t know,” he says softly. “I don’t know what we do. But I can’t let you die here.”

She shuts her eyes tight against the tears, and then she puts on her clothes and her boots and she goes, stepping carefully through the broken glass of her entrance, trying not to leave any more wreckage than she already has.

* * *

It takes him a long time to find the number. There isn’t a website. But Kylo finds it, where you can usually find these things, buried on an old forum for weirdos too weird for Reddit. He dials, swallowing hard.

“Angel Investigations,” says a chipper feminine voice.

“May I speak to Angel?” He didn’t even think to check what time it is; he has no idea what time it is on the west coast. “I know it might be, uh. Late for him.”

The woman on the line sighs. “May I tell him who’s calling?”

He swallows again. “Ben Szolo. Luke Skywalker’s nephew. From the Watchers’ Council.”

“Oh,” she says, with disgust. “Okay.”

It takes a few minutes. Kylo stares at the sunlight and the broken glass. Then an irritated tenor voice says, “Angel speaking.”

“Thank you,” Ben says, trying not to sound too desperate. “For taking the time. To speak with me.”

“How can I help you?”

“I had a – a research question. About the curse which – your soul.” He really should have practiced this. “The escape clause – how does it work?”

There’s a short, angry pause. “That’s a personal goddamn question, you know that? I’m sick of answering prurient questions for a bunch of dirty old men in England. If it’s not in Rupert Giles’s diaries, then it’s none of your goddamn business.”

“I’m sorry,” he says hurriedly. “I don’t mean to – but I need to know.”

“Do you now.” Angel does not sound convinced.

“Please.” He pulls his dirtiest card from his sleeve. “My father. Han Szolo. He said you owed him a favor.”

His father hadn’t said any such thing. But anybody who was alive and moving in supernatural circles in the 1980s had a fifty-fifty chance of either owing his father a favor, or being owed one by him. He shuts his eyes and prays he’s guessed right.

Angel sighs. “I owe the favor to him, not you.”

“I know, but. He’s dead. Please.”

A longer silence this time. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

No one has said that to him. He doesn’t deserve it, anybody’s sorrow for the loss he caused. But his eyes fill with tears and his voice cracks. “Thank you. Please.”

Angel sighs again. “What do you need to know?”

Kylo wipes his nose on his sleeve. “How does the escape clause work? Why even _is_ there an escape clause?”

“It’s not an escape clause. Or it wasn’t meant to be. They meant to tell me about it, see. Only my… some people I was keeping company with at the time, they ate the people who were meant to tell me. It’s not an escape; it’s the sting in the tail.”

“How… how so?”

“When you don’t have a soul, you don’t want one. It’s a weight. It’s a curse, to feel all the evil you’ve done, to care about other people’s pain. But when you have it… you don’t want to go back to what you were. The thing that you were becomes the monster of your worst nightmares, the thing you fear most. They wanted me to know that if I were ever to be truly happy, that monster would come back. They wanted to make me fear happiness. The key to the monster’s cage.”

Kylo’s knuckles are white on the phone. “And the key was…”

Angel sighs. Again. He has a lot of sighs, it seems, or maybe it’s just that Kylo is losing it, turning his words over and over in his head. “It _happened_ after I – you know this, don’t you?”

“Roughly.” He wipes his nose again.

“But it wasn’t the – it wasn’t the physical act.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No. Not to outrage your Watcher-ly sensibilities, but that’s happened before. And since. It was what it _meant._ She was young, you know? She didn’t have to – she’d never – she never would have if she hadn’t trusted me. Loved me. Like I loved her.” It’s Angel who’s hoarse now. “And if someone like that could trust me like that – love me like that – I thought – maybe there was hope for me after all. That I might deserve it.”

Kylo’s mouth is dry. “It was the hope that made you happy? Happy enough?”

“The hope. The love. The trust. It was all there. In the light of her eyes. And that let the monster out, to kill it all.”

“I see,” he says, his head spinning. _Hope. Love. Trust._

“Good. I’m glad you see, because I – I have to go. I’m sorry about your father, Ben.”

Ben stays with his eyes fixed on the sunlit shattered glass and the phone to his ear until long after the call has ended.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> “Would you still love me if I couldn’t be hurt?” Finn asks carefully.
> 
> She rolls over under his arm. “What the hell kind of question is that?”
> 
> “I just mean,” he says, still careful. “Sometimes worrying is part of love, right? Or we love people for being vulnerable.”
> 
> “I would love you just the same,” Rose insists, and then after a moment, her face unfurrows a little and her eyes get softer. “No. I would love you with a lighter heart.”
> 
> “Then I have… some things I want to try.”
> 
> * * *
> 
> A vivero is a live butcher -- you pick your animal, they take it in the back and bring it back out as meat. I am a vegetarian, but I used to wait for the train at 207 and watch them go about their business, and they don't seem less humane than any meat processing facility I've heard of, and they do seem substantially cleaner. One time a rabbit escaped, but then it ran back inside.
> 
> It pains me to give Kylo's scar an origin besides "Rey fucked him up" but she'll find a way to make it her own.
> 
> "Fucking weeb" is of course not what a native speaker from a Hispanophone country would say, but "mi novio es un puto otaku" and other idiomatic variants would not make Rose laugh as much and Poe knows it.
> 
> Cameos this week by generous donors [okpianist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/okaypianist/pseuds/okaypianist) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/okpianist)) and another anonymous donor! This chapter, as all previous, was given generous amounts of time and attention by [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/Bombastique1)).
> 
> The Days of Awe begin next week, so the posting schedule of this fic, such as it is, may be affected. If I don't post before then: may you be inscribed in the book of life.


	12. Of Course There's a Subreddit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> Beyond the hill there’s a wide, spreading lawn surrounded by trees, casting long, uneven shadows on the grass. He puts his arm around her to draw her under the shadows, then drops it. “Get your sword out,” he murmurs. She does. The ring of the metal makes her heart beat faster, and she gives it a little twirl. There are shadows on the path, just as silent as Kylo was. They reek of demon. 
> 
> There are too many of them – twelve, just like he said. But she doesn’t care. They’re vampires. They don’t get to survive her.
> 
> The first one leaps onto the hill, pushing through the brush towards the encampment. Kylo charges, head down, face changed, black coat flapping, stake in his fist. But Rey outruns him, a wild yell tearing out of her as her sword flashes in the yellow lamplight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, the High Holy Days are over, and 5781 is pretty wild so far I must say.

It’s the middle of the day. The sun won’t set for hours, and she didn’t book herself any jobs for the day because she didn’t think it would matter.

Rey could go to Rose and Finn. And what, admit she volunteered for a fate that was Finn’s worst nightmare? The one Rose sold her whole life to save him from?

She could do what she used to do. When she worked 6 to 6 for Platt and none of the people in her address book were really her friends. Lock herself in her room and drink. It seems sadder now than it ever did. And Rose or Finn might hear her, come knock on the door and want to know what’s wrong, because she’s the Slayer and everything depends on her, because people will die if she isn’t faster and stronger and better than everything else in this city.

She could go to Leah. 

She can’t.

It’s cold on the streets, in the middle of November; it’ll be colder in the park. She gets on the fucking train because she doesn’t know what else to do. Gets a seat and lets her head thunk back against the double glass of the window. Closes her eyes and lets herself _not care_ for a little while.

In her dreams she walks the streets of the City of the Dead, surrounded by statues and poems and empty doorways. These dead stay dead, for the most part. Only the wealthy and honored are buried here, people who die in hospitals, with doctors. The dead she fights are the corpses of prostitutes and students. They rise from the alleys and the trash heaps. Sometimes vampires would take advantage of politics, and the dead would rise out of unmarked graves or walk naked out of the sea.

_(“Parasites,” her Watcher says. “They prey on humans, and they prey on human suffering and human evil.”)_

But tonight she’s not looking for a new vampire. A new vampire would be easy. She’s looking for the Crimson Dawn. She counts the narrow streets between the mausoleums, shifting the stake in her hand. She’s working with a longer stake these days, which was her mother’s idea. She counts the streets again. Sniffs the air.

 _“Luke,”_ she yells, annoyed. _“They’re not here!”_

He comes running as fast as he can. She knows she’s lucky, to have a young Watcher, but he’s still so much slower than she is.

“Are you sure?” he gasps. She nods. “Darn!” he says in English. “Sorry, Enfys. I really thought… ”

“Where are they, then? You said the City of the Dead; where’s that if it isn’t La Recoleta? La Chacarita?”

Luke scratches the back of his neck. “Maybe. Maybe it means all of Buenos Aires? Maybe it means something I don’t even know about. Prophecies are like a shell game, you know? The three-card trick. You watch the right hand and you miss what the left hand does.”

Her mother raised her well, so she doesn’t punch him; she just takes a deep breath. “What is the point of a prophecy, then? Why did you make me go to all that trouble to find it, if it’s just a trick?”

He smiles, that dumb boyish smile. “Well. The thing about the three-card game is, it takes two players, doesn’t it? And sometimes you’re the mark. But sometimes… ” His blue eyes go dark in the moonlight, the way they do when he’s seeing with his second sight. “Sometimes, it turns out you’re the sharp.”

 _This stop is: Delancey Essex,_ the tranquil recorded voice of the F train says, and Rey shifts in her sleep.

* * *

Finn doesn’t dream at three in the afternoon. Instead, he remembers. He picks up a delivery shift, and remembers that he doesn’t need an invitation to put his hand across the threshold. He counts his tips and remembers Phasma counting cash with cool precision. The guy at the restaurant calls him José because apparently he can’t be bothered with recalling his actual name, and he remembers Phasma deciding she was going to call him 187, because Dr. Dre isn’t dead and that makes Deep Cover current by her standards, no matter what he has to say about it.

Rose texts him, and he remembers what he wanted to do to her.

He pulls the bike over on a quiet street and digs a plastic knife out of the delivery bag. He bends it against the curb until it snaps, and then he lays the sharp shattered edge against the back of his hand. He swallows, and digs it in.

The blood wells up. Ordinary red blood.

He wipes it away with a paper napkin, and watches his skin seal itself up again like a zipper closing.

* * *

His bed smells like her. He thought it would make it even more impossible to sleep there, but in the last hours of daylight, the scent of her wraps around him like warm arms and draws him down into sleep.

Kylo dreams he’s standing on an unfamiliar beach, something rawer and rockier than Jacob Riis or Coney Island, and darker than Dover. The sky is striped with thin white clouds, and the horizon is dimming orange. He’s never seen this beach in his life.

“Sunset Beach,” says a voice behind him, and yes, the sun is setting into the ocean here. This is somewhere west. “My dad used to surf here.”

He turns. The lucky one is standing there, looking out at the waves. Kylo has never known or needed to know a thing about this other man’s father. That’s what makes him notice the strange, shadowless light of the dream, which is the light all his dreams from the Sight have.

“I just sat on the towel and read manga,” the lucky one says. “Wished I could read them in Japanese. And now Rose says I talk too much about pronouns.” He frowns at Kylo. “You threw me at the Slayer. The other one.”

“Faith Lehane.” The Slayer who was killed by the demon he raised. The dark inversion of his duty. A Watcher who becomes a vampire is a monster among monsters.

“Why did you do that?”

 _You were so lucky. They loved you so much. I could see it in their eyes. Hear it in their voices. You were precious to them._ “I hated you.”

 _“I’m just a little lamb lost in the woods,”_ sings a tremulous voice behind him. He turns. Rey is standing in the surf. She’s nearly naked, just panties and a thin shirt. The water soaks through them; they’re almost transparent. She’s shivering. The wind is blowing from the east, getting harder and colder. She turns her face away from him and the wind carries her voice away. Then she turns back to him. “Does it have to be winter, Ben?”

He reaches out to her, but the ocean pulls her away. “I want,” he says, and she interrupts him. Her lips are turning blue. 

“You said it was like winter. That I had to be ready.”

She’s so naked. He has to keep the cold away from her.

“Ben?” she asks, her teeth chattering. “What if it’s not winter?”

He wakes up. And he hears the faint echo of _42nd Street Bryant Park_ as Rey wakes up too.

He reaches for his phone. He feels sick. He doesn’t get better, he only gets worse. He fails and fails and fails. But if he can’t do it, he has to ask someone who can.

His thumb hovers over the little icon of the phone receiver. He knows the number; she lives where she always has, and she made him learn it by heart before she’d let him play in the park or walk to the library alone. _If anything happens, if you get lost, tell a grown-up to call us collect._

He has to do this. But he can’t; he isn’t strong enough. And then the text alert appears.

**Rey:** You’re wrong aren’t you  
  
**Rey:** It doesn’t mean what you thought  
  
**Rey:** The prophecy you told me  
  


It was her, in the dream. Not a vision of her, really her. She doesn’t have the Sight but her dreams are part of the same supernatural current as his, and they’ve fallen into it together. He has a brief flash of her, walking quickly past the mosaic walls of the tunnels under Bryant Park, ignoring the etched quotations and golden-tiled root systems as she texts him. Her hair is messy; he wants to stroke it back and draw it into shape with his hands.

**Me:** Yes. I think so. I’m so sorry.  
  


He already knows he’s worthless as a Watcher; why does he keep trying to be one for her? He ought to let her go. Leave her alone.

**Rey:** So what do I do now how do I take out snoke?  
  


He can’t leave her alone. Ben Szolo was a bad Watcher; he has to be something better.

**Me:** Come meet me tonight. 10PM. 177 and Devoe. West Farms stop on the 2/5.  
  


* * *

Finn comes home to find Rose slumped on the sofa and hate-watching _Chilling Adventures of Sabrina._ He drops his bag by his shoes and comes to slump next to her. “Can’t believe they treat witchcraft like it’s an _ethnicity,”_ she grumbles. “And it’s _so_ Eurocentric.” She leans her head back to look at his face. “How’re you doing, baby?”

“I’m okay,” he says. _Not a scratch on me._

She tucks herself under his arm. “We can turn it off if you want to watch something else. GBBO? _Porco Rosso?”_

 _“Porco_ sounds good,” he says, because he knows it by heart and she won’t mind if he talks over it.

They watch the red plane and the pink pig in silence for a while. Finn caresses the gentle line of her chin with his thumb. She’s warm and alive and good. He remembers hating that. He would have gone straight for her the moment he woke up if Phasma hadn’t stopped him. She was the first thing on his mind and it made him furious, how good she was. He wanted to hold her down and rip the warmth and goodness from her the way it had been ripped out of him. 

He’d rather die than be someone who wants that again. But maybe that’s not an option.

He moves his hand to her shoulder. “Would you still love me if I couldn’t be hurt?” he asks carefully.

It’s too serious a question; she stops the movie and rolls over under his arm. “What the hell kind of question is that?”

“I just mean,” he says, still careful. “Sometimes worrying is part of love, right? Or we love people for being vulnerable.”

“I worry because I love you; I don’t love you because I worry. I would love you just the same,” Rose insists, and then after a moment, her face unfurrows a little and her eyes get softer. “No. I would love you with a lighter heart.”

“Then I have… some things I want to try.”

The frown is back full-force. “This is your lead-in to that conversation? I thought you liked that list thing we did.”

“Not like that! Not sex things.” He clears his throat, and tries to think how to suggest this in a less-horrifying, more-appealing way. “Magic things.”

“Oh!” she says, immediately diverted, like a small, adorable bomb with the red wire cut. “Okay!”

He does know his girlfriend.

* * *

Rey sees him standing in front of a shuttered storefront, watching the cars behaving badly as they get on the Cross Bronx Expressway. He’s gotten himself a long dark coat from somewhere, maybe to fit in with all the mortals who need warm clothes in November. He was never going to fit in particularly well standing on an empty street under the awning of a closed safety-gear supply store, staring at the bus depot, but there he is anyway.

She thinks about his face in the dream, bleak and full of longing as he stretched out his long hands to her. She wants to touch his cheek, see if she can bring that broken, yearning look into waking life. She’d called him _Ben_ and he’d answered. She doesn’t think he’ll do that now.

“Did you come here to apologize to the MTA?” she asks.

“No. I’m going to the park.”

“What park?” He points. Between the depot gate and the overpass railing, she glimpses a narrow band of grass. “That’s a park?”

“Starlight Park.” The light changes and he crosses the street with that ridiculous headlong stride of his, and Rey hurries after him. Her sword, slung over her shoulder in a sheath Rose enchanted to look like a workout bag, knocks against her spine.

It’s a ludicrous name. There’s nowhere in this fucking city you can see the stars. It’s barely a park; the grass is just wide enough for some picnic tables. There are trees and shrubs on one side and the depot’s high fence, topped with a Y of barbed wire, on the other. Ahead of them, the colossal concrete slabs of the Expressway overpass loom. But there’s a smell she can’t quite place. A good smell.

“Is it _colder_ here?” she asks incredulously.

“It’s the river. Just on the other side of the trees.”

That’s the smell. Fresh water. She can hear it, too, now that she knows what she’s hearing, a cold clean counterpoint to the Expressway. “Why are we here? Isn’t Snoke in Brooklyn?”

He stops. There are lights along the path, old ones burning yellow bulbs. They throw the unnatural dead whiteness of his face into relief. “How many vampires can you take at one time? Average vampires, not old ones like Pryde or Snoke.”

“My record is four,” she says defensively. “But I can do five if Poe helps.”

His eyes flicker over her face before they catch on hers. “I’d say I can take four too. Snoke almost never has fewer than five members of his court with him. And Snoke will keep your hands full by himself. But I have a theory I want to test.”

There’s a cold thrill in her spine. “Yeah?”

“I think between us we can take more than eight.”

She licks her lips. “There are more than eight vampires in this park?”

He starts walking again. “There’s a little hill on the other side of the overpass. Lots of brush cover. There’s an encampment. There’s a group of twelve vampires planning to come feed off them tonight. Can you swim?”

“Yeah?”

“If you feel like you’re being overwhelmed, jump in the water. Vampires don’t like moving water.”

“What? Why not?”

He shrugs. “Why garlic? Why any of it? There are theories. But it’s only speculation.” He sniffs the air. “We need to get downwind.”

There aren’t any fires in the encampment on the hill. Rey thinks maybe she can see the vague outline of a tent through the greenery as they pass out of the shadow of the Expressway. But mainly it’s the sounds and the scents that let her see the shape of the place, where the people are sitting and lying. There isn’t much movement, but she can hear them breathing. As they walk past, Kylo suddenly becomes absolutely silent. The sounds of his shoes on the concrete path fade away to nothing, and the rustle of his clothes goes mute. Of course he was never breathing to begin with.

Beyond the hill there’s a wide, spreading lawn surrounded by trees, casting long, uneven shadows on the grass. He puts his arm around her to draw her under the shadows, then drops it. “Get your sword out,” he murmurs. She does. The ring of the metal makes her heart beat faster, and she gives it a little twirl. There are shadows on the path, just as silent as Kylo was. They reek of demon. 

There are too many of them – twelve, just like he said. But she doesn’t care. They’re vampires. They don’t get to survive her.

The first one leaps onto the hill, pushing through the brush towards the encampment. Kylo charges, head down, face changed, black coat flapping, stake in his fist. But Rey outruns him, a wild yell tearing out of her as her sword flashes in the yellow lamplight.

Maybe silence would have been better. A stealthy chance to take out a few before the others noticed. Rey does not give a fuck. She loves the fear in their yellow eyes, that oh-shit-a-Slayer look before she cuts the head off one and whirls through the dust of him to take another. And Kylo’s beside her, brutal and strong, crashing through them with his fists and driving his stake through them with quick, vicious jabs. When one of them dives under Rey’s guard, Kylo kicks him so he rolls at Rey’s feet so she can behead him with a golf swing. When one grabs Kylo’s stake hand and starts to twist it back, Rey swings her sword between them and leaves the other vampire two hands short of a grip. Kylo reduces her to dust with one brusque thrust before he pivots to the next clash.

When they’re done they stand at the foot of the hill, covered in dust and sweat, weapons still raised. No one stirs in the encampment. “They’re afraid,” he says in his low voice, and turns back towards the lawn. “They don’t know what happened or why. They don’t know we won’t come for them next.”

Rey starts to raise her voice to say something reassuring, and hesitates. What would be reassuring, anyway. “Hey – good night,” is what she comes up with, in a half-embarrassed semi-squeak. “Have a good night.”

No one responds.

She doesn’t have anything else to offer them. She turns away.

“Does that happen a lot?” she demands, as she follows Kylo onto the lawn. “Big groups of vampires going after homeless people?”

“Sometimes,” he says. “Most vampires treat them as a last resort.”

“So what was that?”

“Not every vampire is part of an organized court like Snoke’s. These ones just went on a subreddit, listened to a police scanner, and decided to be assholes.”

“There’s a subreddit for vampires?”

“Several.” He’s just as silent walking across the wet grass as he was on the path.

“Of fucking course there are. What’re they called?”

“I’ll read them for you. That’s what I’m for.” He says it absently, and a melody circles in her head. _I’m just a little lamb lost in the woods…_ “You shouldn’t spin so much; it leaves your back open.”

“I only spin for leverage.”

“You don’t need it, and it makes you vulnerable.” He pauses in the middle of the wide lawn. The grass is getting damp with the dew of a winter night. “Here, try it on me.”

“Try cutting off your head?”

“I’m wrong about the prophecy. Maybe it’s nothing to do with me; maybe you kill me after all.” His face is stiff, reaching for impassivity, but his eyes are hungry and sad. She turns the sword in her hand so that the flat will hit him, not the edge, and spins, swinging.

In the micro-second in which the swing turns her away, he seizes her. One arm wraps around beneath her breasts and lifts her; his other hand tangles in her hair and pulls her head to the side.

“See?” he says softly. His lips are against her throat, tracing the last faint shadow of the bite he’d taken. “Vulnerable.” He bends, and her feet are on the ground again, but he doesn’t let her go. His hands slide down her arms and circle her wrists where they grip her sword. He adjusts her grip, and guides her through a tighter stroke. “There,” he says, and his mouth is still at her throat. “Less open.”

She can’t help it, can she, the way she leans into the weight of his body? “I thought you liked me open.”

He noses under the collar of her jacket, finding the curve of her shoulder to mouth at until she shudders. “I do,” he mumbles savagely against her skin. “Legs open. Mouth open. Just for me.”

* * *

He licks along her collar bone, pulling roughly at her jacket and her shirt so he can get what he wants. Or some of it. He’ll take sweat instead of blood. He’ll get inside her body if he can’t get inside her mind and her hard, sweet little heart. He can hear that heart beating faster. She wants to stand guard over this encampment, he knows; she wants to stand guard over every block and alley and underpass. Her pulse thrums under his tongue, and he starts to drag her into the far shadows, where a knot of naked sycamores around a willow tree will hide them.

Then she speaks. “Is this what it would be like if you hadn’t died?”

He can’t move. “What?”

“Like, if you hadn’t died so your mom was retired and you were my normal Watcher?” He can only see the edge of her face, which is turned down to look at his hands around her wrists. “Would it be like this?”

He can’t quite understand what she’s asking, what she means by _this,_ but he can’t help the way his teeth clench. “You wouldn’t have liked Ben Szolo.”

“Really?” she asks, and tilts her head. It bares the line of her neck in a way she has to know will drive him crazy. He couldn’t bite her when she wanted him to, but now that he shouldn’t, she’s making his whole head hurt with the pressure of keeping back his fangs.

“I wouldn’t be here if Ben Szolo weren’t weak and stupid,” he says. “And he could never smell how badly you need to be fucked.”

He lets go of one of her wrists and digs his fingers under the waistband of her jeans. His searching fingers make her grind her against him, and he was already hard but the filthy rub of that soft, sweet ass makes him feel like he’s made of steel. And _fuck_ she’s so slick and warm, squirming as he touches her.

Last time he made her quiver and whimper. He wants to fuck her until her eyes roll back. And he can do whatever he wants and never worry for his soul, because she doesn’t love him and she doesn’t trust him and there’s no hope she ever will. But he can have this.

So he’ll have it hard.

He plays with her, pretends to let her go and then snatches her back, holding her tight and rubbing himself against her hungrily. And she plays along, gasping and humming and rolling her hips in slow circles that make him hiss and clutch her closer.

When she throws him to the ground, he barely feels his back and skull connect with the hard wood of the willow; he feels her hands at his belt-buckle, little brushes of her fingers over his straining cock as she works. He’s a demon, and she’s the only predator nature provides, and she wants his cock. He pushes her head down, and she bends. His big brutal fingers run over the surface of her hair as she puts her mouth on him. Her cheeks hollow as she sucks him so hard his legs twitch.

“That’s it,” he mutters, and her soft hair rasps his skin as he digs his fingers in involuntarily. “Go on. Suck me dry.”

But she never wants to give him what he wants, does she? She slides her mouth off him with a coy little slurp, and now she’s kicking off her boots in the wet grass and shoving her jeans and panties down. He drags at her jacket and her shirt; he wants to see her pretty tits again. She sinks down on him and his head snaps back against the tree with a hollow thunk.

 _“Fuck,”_ he groans, and thrusts up into her. Her thighs tremble in his grip. “Twice in one day, huh? Whenever you need it, Slayer. I’ll give it to you.”

“Will you?” she asks, gasping for breath, and he slams her down to prove it. She sits up straighter in his lap, and her breasts bounce and her eyes pierce him. “And Ben wouldn’t?”

He stutters underneath her for a second. If she offered? The Western branch of the Watchers’ Council has forbidden sexual relations with Slayers since 1763. But that was when Slayers were children. Rey’s a woman.

And Ben was weak.

“Just a mortal,” he snarls. “Dead. Gone. No one misses him. Couldn’t give you anything. Couldn’t give you what you need.” He twists, to roll her and hold her down in the grass, ride her until she shrieks. But she doesn’t let him. She grounds herself through her knees and shifts her weight, and he stays pinned where he is. 

“What do I need?” she whispers. Before he can answer, her arms go around his neck. She slows her pace, rising and falling gently, and touches her lips lightly to his. He stares at her, as dazed as if she’d drugged him. Her fingers trace through the hair at the back of his neck, and she circles her hips, rolling her whole strong body in pleasure. When she gets close, she squeezes so tight that tears leak from his eyes and blur her together with the willow branches. He can’t resist the flutter and jerk of her coming, and he comes to the sound she makes as she finishes, which could almost be his name. There are stars behind his eyes.

She stays there, arms around him, underneath the tree, while the world spins around him. “I don’t know what I need,” she whispers. “And neither do you.” He suddenly realizes that the shaking in her limbs isn’t any leftover tremor of orgasm. She’s mortal, and half-naked in the damp grass on a November night. She’s shivering. She puts her cheek against his to speak closer to his ear, and her voice is so soft. “But I think Ben could have kept me warm.”

She slips away from him, and he slips under a wave of unbearable longing. He wants to be warm again, and keep her warm.

He can’t. Of course he can’t; the grave erases Ben Szolo’s name, and he’s nothing but a demon shackled to a soul. But – 

She’s pulling her pants up. He reaches out to her blindly. “Rey. I need to talk to – ” He has her by the ankle. She goes still, and he looks up into her face. “Will you help me talk to my mother?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> “No,” Leah says, with finality. Her hand covers the text of his translation, as if the wait staff might read it as they squeeze between the tables. “There’s too much ambiguity, and I won’t gamble with my Slayer’s safety.”
> 
> “I do dangerous things all the time,” Rey protests.
> 
> “Not as dangerous as Snoke,” his mother says. “Not as dangerous as that.” And by _that,_ he’s pretty sure, she means him.
> 
> * * *
> 
> The City of the Dead Enfys is patrolling is [La Recoleta Cemetery,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Recoleta_Cemetery) 14 acres of entirely above-ground interment vaults. The political situation to which she refers is Agrentina's Dirty War, which often saw political dissidents "disappeared" into black sites, buried unmarked graves, or thrown from helicopters into the sea. Cemeterio de la Chacarita is the other major cemetery in Buenos Aires; it's larger than Cemeterio de la Recoleta but less distinctive.
> 
> 187 is the number of the section in the California Penal Code which defines murder; its use as slang for murder was brought into the mainstream in 1992 by Dr. Dre's song "Deep Cover," which had the refrain, "'Cause it's 187 on a undercover cop."
> 
> The Bronx Expressway is the worst highway in America, and is widely considered responsible for the urban decay of the South Bronx. Starlight Park has recently seen a lot of development; just south of the encampment that Ben and Rey save and east of the lawn with the willow, there's a bridge across the river to a much larger green area with a playground and soccer fields. Since the pandemic it's a major social center.
> 
> Thank you to [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/Bombastique1)) for putting up with my anxiety around this story!


	13. Hot Chocolate and Phoenicio-Punic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> “Where’s your father, anyway? Used to be, weather gets cold, in comes Szolo, asking for a discount on account of how he’s Hungarian too and nobody’s going to eat the lúdláb torta if he doesn’t. Psh!”
> 
> Ben knows. He can hear it, the gruff wheedling and the sound of his father’s fork hitting the plate as he spears the rum-soaked sour cherries and talks with his mouth full, _birch branches in the trunk; we can burn them in the sink tonight once you’re mother’s out. Birch ash, boychik; great for spells, and maybe I’ll go out with your mother tomorrow and see how the vampires like it –_

He and Rose look down at her arm. There’s a shallow, inch-long cut on the inside, just above her elbow. He takes a deep breath, and scrapes the knife along his finger, pressing down until the blood wells up. He tries to let it drop into Rose’s cut, but it clings to his skin, and in the end he smears it down the length of the little wound he’d asked her to inflict on herself.

It’s just blood. Just a smear of red on her skin, and he’s hurt her, and it’s unhygienic, and he’s probably hallucinated all of it and now all he can do is apologize. Except that the smear is sinking into her skin, and the skin is pulling itself together again, sealing up whole and smooth under a pink residue that’s so faint he can barely see it.

“That is… ” He doesn’t even know what to call it. Wild? Incomprehensible? Completely disorienting? “What does this mean?”

Rose is looking back and forth between her arm and him. She grabs his hand, and looks at the finger he sliced. There’s absolutely no trace of the knife. “Finn. Finn this is _incredible.”_

“I just have a lot of questions. I mean… what does it mean? What do I do? What _am_ I?” He ought to feel invulnerable, but he doesn’t. He’s just imagining the part where the government finds out and drags him away to a lab and he lives forever and never sees Rose again, except maybe through plexiglass, and he does not like it.

Rose hugs him. “You’re Finn, and you’re safe.”

“I don’t… ” He’s so uneasy. He wants to hug her back but he can’t. “I don’t feel safe.”

She looks up at him, and the worry line between her eyes springs back. He swallows guiltily and looks away. It’s not that he wants her to worry. And maybe it’s just trauma; he’s a Black man in the US and he’s already died once, so who knows, maybe he wouldn’t feel safe if he were in a self-sustaining steel-clad bubble suit. But he doesn’t want to lie to her. 

He watches thoughts cross her face like a lagged replay of his. She puts her little hand up to his cheek, and he rubs his cheek against it, nuzzling. Part of him wants to just go to bed. Who cares? He’ll die tomorrow, or else he won’t. Just like everybody else. Just like it always was before.

“Maybe I can fight more now,” he says. “Since I’ll recover.”

“Maybe,” Rose says, and he snorts at her tone.

“Thought you said I was safe?”

“Well, I’m not saying you should jump out of a plane, either!” she says defensively. “Why take risks if you don’t have to?”

“Maybe I can be like a human first-aid kit. If Rey gets hurt I can just bleed on her a bit, and bam! Fixed Slayer.”

Rose looks down at her healed hand, pursing her lips. “Well. Maybe. I cut my skin and your blood healed me where it touched my skin. If I were hurt more deeply would you have to bleed all over the inside, too? And what if a vampire sucked out all her blood; would you have to replace hers with all of yours? What if a vampire sucked out all of _your_ blood?”

“Like I said. A lot of questions.”

“Yeah,” she sighs. “Sorry. I just liked thinking… it could all be okay for once. Just totally okay.”

He shrugs, and she presses her face into his chest. “It’s not _not_ okay,” he says.

“That’s true.” She looks at her hand again. “I’m not sure I want to cut my tendon or break my arm for a test, especially if it turns out it needs like a quart of your blood to heal it. There might be some other tests we can do to get an idea, though.”

“I’m game,” Finn says. “I was hoping you knew some things like that.”

A long time later, he’s kind of wishing she knew fewer things like that. Or would at least stop looking up new ones. It’s not like it hurts-hurts to keep cutting his finger so he can bleed on litmus paper and magnesium strips and incense sticks and dried marigold petals and chalk circles and strips of white linen anointed with blessed oils and everything else Rose comes up with, but it does get old fast. Even if he heals up every time, smooth as silk.

When Rey comes home, he thinks he might get a break, at least to tell her about it, but she stumbles through the door with fucked-up hair and her head down, and Rose puts her hand on his arm. “She hasn’t been home in like 42 hours,” she whispers. “I think she’s been working all the times she’s not fighting. She still owes me for this month’s rent.”

Okay. They can let her sleep. 

“I think Leah’s really the one we need to talk to anyway,” Rose says, and he agrees.

* * *

He’d really hoped that Hux would be one of the weak ones, condemned to centuries of hunger and madness in his coffin. But no such luck. Apparently the fucker clawed his way out in record time and went on a killing spree, and now Snoke loves him.

“He got his father to invite him in while he had company,” Kylo hears Phasma tell DJ with reluctant admiration. “Ate his father, killed his guests, and brought the housekeeper back to share.”

“Thought that would attract the wrong kind of attention,” DJ observes.

“I’d have said so, but he said a murder on the Upper East Side would distract from murders in Brooklyn, and I suppose he’s right.”

Kylo Ren discovers that he very much dislikes it when Snoke and Phasma think Hux is right about something. When Kylo is right about something — which he often is, because he’s a Watcher — _was_ a Watcher — Snoke pats him on the head and praises his own foresight in taking him on. When Hux is right about something — which Kylo is skeptical of, as a general concept — it gives him authority in Snoke’s court.

Rationally, he knows that that’s because Snoke sired Hux himself, while he’s a rabid lunatic who murdered his own sire, goes into rages out of nowhere, and talks to himself. And rationally, he knows that it’s for the best. They leave him alone this way. When he gets so hungry he’s delirious, or when the Sight takes over his eyes, nobody asks any questions. He can be alone. He likes it that way.

But the demon in him wants that status and respect. It wants to stand at the hand of power, and _have_ power, and be offered blood the way the others offer their half-dead victims to Snoke and Phasma and now Hux.

He’d never drink. If he put his teeth to skin he’d gag before he’d bite. But he still wants to. To have the warm humans offered for his approval and bite and drink, and drink, and drink.

Rey smells so good.

They all smell her on him. He doesn’t need to wash her off now, not when Snoke’s told him he can kill her, that she’s a hindrance to his plans with the way she patrols the halls of the building he owns and keeps his court from taking what’s theirs. He says he fought her; he reeks of Slayer; they all believe him. They all lick their chops the first time they smell her on him, fangs emerging. They all want what he’s had: a taste of her.

“I don’t understand why he doesn’t just kill her,” Hux says, in a voice that’s meant to carry to him where he sits, staring at the backs of his hands and imagining what Rey’s hot little fingers would feel like if he weren’t corpse-cold.

He turns his eyes to Hux’s with deliberate slowness. He can’t put him in thrall now that he’s a vampire, but Kylo thinks there must be something in the man’s brain that remembers how it turned to putty in his hands. Maybe that’s why Hux hates him so much. “Things happen when they have to happen,” he says, and all the other conversation in Snoke’s basement court goes still.

“I’m of the opinion that they ought to happen on schedule.”

“The schedule isn’t yours to make.”

“I don’t see why not. Suppose six or seven of us came with you, when you tracked the Slayer. I think that might help push her date of death up considerably.”

“Do you want to come with me?” Kylo snarls. “See how your schedule fares when you’re facing a Slayer under a protection charm and a team of vampire hunters with crossbows and axes.” He’s grossly overselling Rey’s little band, but also he’d love to see Poe’s spiked baseball bat hit home through Hux’s chest. “When I’m alone I can lure her out alone.”

“Still,” Snoke says, with a motion of his face that might, centuries ago, have raised his eyebrow. “I don’t see why you shouldn’t lure her to us.”

“She’s mine,” he snarls, fangs emerging, furious with fear and hunger, and Snoke slams him to the ground. It hurts but he doesn’t care. None of them will touch her. Hux laughs, and then Kylo hears his head hit the concrete too. It’s a satisfying sound.

“Both of you have your points,” Snoke says cooly. “Hux, you must have respect for prophecy. And Kylo… if you can’t defeat her alone, then we must try other methods.”

“I’ll do it,” he swears hurriedly. “I’ll bring her down and take her blood. I’ll bring her to you.”

Snoke turns away. “See that you do.”

* * *

When Finn wakes up, Rose is still sleeping like a slightly drooly angel, and Rey’s sitting on the counter by the sink eating store-brand honey-nut oat circles from the bag in fistfuls. “What we need,” she says as she swallows, “is for somebody from Snoke’s building — the one he owns, I mean, 46 Church, not the one he lives in — to give us a copy of the front door key. That way we can go over every morning and see if there are eviction notices and we won’t have to keep trying to get buzzed in. Or the super, maybe he can give us a key. Or check for us, I guess!”

Oh shit. “Did you have coffee?” he asks with bleary suspicion. “And — wait, you know where Snoke lives?”

“Yeah,” she says, chewing. “Tracked Kylo Ren there. Just down the street on Ocean Parkway. Shoulda guessed with the blacked-out windows but you can’t just go charging in just because somebody’s got dark curtains.”

“You didn’t think maybe you should mention this?” he asks, putting his fingers to his eyes.

“Sorry,” she says guiltily. “I haven’t seen you since I found it.”

He sighs. Fair — she’s been out working. Still, she could have texted. “So, what are we doing? Just light the place up?” He mimes flicking a lighter.

The chewing slows slightly. “’S a thought. Won’t they smell the smoke? Then they jump out the windows and we’ve got a sidewalk full of vampires.”

“Yeah, and if we do it in daytime they’ll all go up like torches.”

“I think if we do it in daytime somebody’s going to call the cops.”

“On you?” He gestures at her general white-girl-ness.

“Have you _been_ on Ocean Parkway? Those Hassids won’t hesitate. But I could try to be stealthy. I just need to make sure they don’t have an escape route through the sewers or something. Suck to firebomb and maybe burn down the neighborhood and then they all escape.”

“Okay,” he says, going for the eggs and the leftover rice. “So we need what? Blueprints?”

“I’ll just ask Kylo,” she says, and he almost drops the eggs.

“I’m sorry,” he says, as calmly as he can. “Did you just say you were going to ask… Kylo Ren? Kylo Ren the psychopath? Who… threw me… at — ”

“ — at Faith Lehane?” she finishes with a raised eyebrow. “Who held you down so Rose could heal you. That Kylo Ren. I’ve never been to Sunset Beach, Finn. Had any interesting dreams lately?”

He gives up on breakfast and just leans his head against the fridge. “I knew my dreams were… fuck.”

“Sorry,” she says, and she does sound sympathetic. “I was really there, and he was really there, so I thought probably you were, too.”

“What have I done to deserve this?” Finn asks the pink-purple-blue magnet beside his head.

“Nothing, I don’t think,” she says. “But I don’t think any of us did.”

“I think Kylo Ren has done some shit. No — I _know_ he has.”

“I know,” she says. “But Ben Szolo didn’t.”

Which is true. Kylo Ren may have raised a demon to open a hellmouth, but when Finn was a vampire, he — yeah. He has also done some shit. Not as bad as the Starkiller demon, maybe, but _just a couple murders, just a few folks I ate and left sprawled on the sidewalk to traumatize folks_ — it’s not good. And Rose can say it wasn’t him, and he can know he’d never do that before or after the demon was in him, but he still remembers doing it. How good it felt to do it. He shudders.

Rey slides off the counter and puts her hand on his arm. “Hey,” she says. “Hey. Whatever we did or didn’t do. We’re in the fight now, right?”

“Yeah,” Finn says, and doesn’t tell her how badly he wants to leave it. Even if it frightens her and hurts her and exhausts her, he can tell she gets high off the danger and the combat and the killing. He never does. Never feels anything but sick and scared and tired. And there are people who do murders in their own right minds, no demons involved, and then they don’t devote their whole lives to stopping other murders, they just apologize to the people they’ve hurt, and try to help them.

But Finn can’t do that. He tried, and they didn’t believe him, and who can blame them? So this is what’s left for him.

* * *

“You owe us double from last time,” Rey reminds Dr. Aphra.

“Oh right, right.” Rey watches, eagle-eyed, as the professor riffles through her wallet. Someone who will push it with you once will try it again. But they get their twenties, correctly counted out, and the professor smiles brightly, like she knows how skeptical Rey was. “If you see Leah, please do tell her that the dogs are still alive and well. I really don’t think she thought I could manage it.”

After the door closes behind them, Rey starts to pocket the money when Rose makes a quiet coughing sound. “I’m sorry, Rey,” she says, “and you don’t have to give me all of it if you’re hurting or anything, but remember about the rent?”

Rey feels the blood drain from her face, but she tries to keep her voice light. “Yes! Sorry. Sorry I forgot.” She hands over the cash. It’s less than she owes. But there’s still time today to earn more. She just has to… hustle. For a truly nauseating moment, she misses the relative steadiness of churning out clickbait for Platt. But she can’t go back to that.

Rose is frowning as she looks at her. “I actually should talk to Leah,” Rey says, taking a step towards the elevator.

“Me too,” Rose says, following.

“Well, if you’re going to be talking to her, I can try to fit a job in and come back later.”

Rose grimaces. “I think maybe you should come with me.”

“But I — ” She has to hustle. And God, it’s going to be hard enough to talk to Leah about Ben as it is.

“Rey,” Rose says firmly, “I _really_ think you should be there.”

“Is it about 46 Church Ave? We need them to trust us, but I don’t see how we can without convincing them vampires are real. Do you think she has a book or something we could borrow?”

“I mean… maybe. But I doubt it. And it’s not about 46 Church. It’s about Finn.”

* * *

Kylo stands for a moment in the cold night air of Amsterdam avenue, beneath the dark red awning, and steels himself. He opens the door and is immediately overwhelmed with hunger. Partly it’s the warmth; the place is half-full of the customers, comfortable with their food and drink and conversation, or huddled over notebooks, and the warm air carries the smell of them to him. But partly it’s habit. When Ben was a child, the wares of the Hungarian Pastry Shop were exactly at eye level as the door opened, stacks and stacks of rainbow-sprinkled cookies and almond horns and palmiers bigger than his mother’s hands, rows of eclairs and creampuffs, heaps of poppyseed and apricot hamentaschen.

All of it might as well be made of painted clay, for all the good it does him now.

He looks around the shop. There’s no sign of his mother or Rey. He should go back out and wait on the street so he isn’t tempted by –

“Hey!” says an impatient voice, and he turns around. One of the women who work the shop is frowning at him from behind the counter. She looks the same as she always has, petite and bespectacled, with her hair in a dark green wrap. “I thought it was you. The Szolo boy. It’s been years. What were you studying, again?”

He wants to deny it. Say she’s taken him for someone else. But it’s warm in here and his mother will be here any second so instead he gives in. “Ancient Religion in North Africa and the Southern Mediterranean,” he says, which is what he always said to excuse the books he always carried.

“Right, right. You gonna publish someday soon?” He shakes his head, and she gives him a _your funeral_ look. “Where’s your father, anyway? Used to be, weather gets cold, in comes Szolo, asking for a discount on account of how he’s Hungarian too and nobody’s going to eat the lúdláb torta if he doesn’t. Psh!”

Ben knows. He can hear it, the gruff wheedling and the sound of his father’s fork hitting the plate as he spears the rum-soaked sour cherries and talks with his mouth full, _birch branches in the trunk; we can burn them in the sink tonight once you’re mother’s out. Birch ash, boychik; great for spells, and maybe I’ll go out with your mother tomorrow and see how the vampires like it —_

“He’s dead,” he says. He can hear all that, but he can hear his father’s neck snap, too. “Murdered out in California.”

“My God,” the woman says, shocked. She touches her mouth. “Sorry. My God.”

“Please don’t say anything about it to my mother,” he says. He doesn’t try to put her in thrall, just asks her, like one human would to another. “She’s — it’s very hard for her.”

“Of course,” the woman says, and Rey comes through the door. Her cheeks are rosy with the cold, and her hands are stuffed deep in her jacket pockets.

“Your mom’s coming,” she says. “She and Rose are just still talking outside so I thought I’d come in and get warm.”

“Of course,” he says, and swallows. She ought to be warm.

“What can I get you?” the woman behind the counter asks, and Kylo, who can’t eat any of the pretty things under the glass counter, turns to Rey. 

She’s staring at the pastry but when she sees him look at her, she shifts and stares fixedly ahead. “I’ll just have water, thanks.”

“A slice of lúdláb and an isler cookie, please,” he says. “And two hot chocolates.” He can’t eat, but he can drink, and if he has to sit politely beside his nice warm Slayer without kissing or licking or biting or sucking, he can at least get something hot and sweet to fill his mouth with.

“...bring him around for some tests,” his mother’s voice says. “Goodnight, Rose.” And then she’s there beside him. “I assume we should sit in the back for this conversation.”

The tables are packed tightly; Ben has to turn sideways to get between them. He takes the chair at the back wall. Lets them corner him, if it helps her feel safer. His mother takes the chair opposite him, and puts a stake on the table between them. “Just in case,” she says pleasantly.

She didn’t need to show it to him. He reaches into his coat with carefully-performed slowness and takes out the paper.

He unfolds the translation and lays it flat on the table, facing her. His transcription of the lines from the codex, his literal gloss, and his final translation. He puts his hands on his knees and waits.

She plucks the paper up and considers it. He watches her eyes move over it, once for the Phoenicio-Punic, once for the gloss, once for the translation. Then once again. Her lips purse, and then move in the shape of the words. Finally she puts it down on the table.

“That is the attested word for a Watcher in that period? The shin-mem-rūsh root isn’t likely to refer to some other kind of guard or lookout?”

“Yes. It appears one other place in the Codex. It also refers to Slayer’s Watcher.” The server puts the cake and the cookie in front of him. He pushes them both to Rey. He sees his mother see his father’s favorite dessert, her son’s favorite treat. He sees Rey see _chocolate._

“Oh — I can’t,” she says. “I thought — ”

“I can’t eat them,” he says. He scrapes the whipped cream off his drink and onto the plate in front of her. “I thought you’d like them. Don’t worry — I’ll pay for them.”

“Oh — ” she says again, and then her mouth is full of cake. She eats ravenously. He lifts his hot chocolate to his mouth with a shaking hand. It’s thick and warm and has no taste at all. His mother is watching Rey eat too. Her eyes look wet. When she sees him see her, they ice over. The paper in her hand says, _he will kill two fathers._

“Rey tells me that Snoke believes — or has been led to believe — that _peh_ might refer to a Hellmouth.”

“Yes. It was the Master of Ren who told him that. Not me. They had a fragmentary copy. The beginning and the end.”

“Ah.” She looks down at the paper again, and reads his translation in a dry, scholarly voice. “‘The Watcher will fall, and he will kill two fathers. The Slayer will know him, and he will bring her down. He will take blood and life, and a new and terrible mouth will open.’ The Order of Ren had the beginning. And the end. And that’s why they wanted… ”

“Uncle Luke,” he says, looking at the table. Rey has finished the cake, and is crunching through the chocolate-covered cookie. “They wanted Uncle Luke.”

“Yes.” She sounds a little hoarse. “My son was meant to be… only a casualty.”

There is some other world where that is true. Where Ben Szolo found his way to his death, and Han Szolo is alive, and Leah Organa’s life is not so bitter. “Tai, too. Tam Rivera. All of them.”

“And you killed the Master of Ren? After he sired you?”

“Yes.” There are three basic ways to kill a vampire: wood, fire, and decapitation. Waking up to the face of the man who killed Tai, he’d opted for decapitation. A blunt, bloody and brutal method of decapitation, but the head came off in the end, and the Master of the Order of Ren turned to dust.

“So you are a very good candidate for the first part of this prophecy,” she says, after a long moment, and her voice is a little brisker and less personal. “And a Hellmouth would be _petan,_ not _peh.”_

“That’s what I thought. It’s a mouth; a literal mouth. He thinks her blood will open a Hellmouth. I thought it would be her mouth; that I would make her a vampire.”

“And you don’t think that anymore?” She lays the translation down on the table and runs her fingers over it, ironing it flat.

“No.” He swallows. Her attitude towards the Sight, both his and Luke’s, has always been ambivalent. The last time he told her about a vision, he’d — her son and her brother had died.

He’s surprised when Rey beats him to it. “I had a dream,” she says. There’s hot chocolate on her lip. A thin edge of foam over a dark smear of cake frosting. “I had a dream he was wrong. And he was in it… like, he was dreaming it too?”

He nods. “Yes. I was wrong. But I think I understand it now.”

“You do?” Rey asks, surprised, at the same time that his mother says, skeptically, “Do you.”

He takes another sip of the hot chocolate. It might as well be chalk. He tries to steady his hand as he replaces it, so the heavy cup doesn’t clatter against the saucer. “It says _blood_ and _life_ but there are no possessive suffixes. I think I’m meant to take _her_ blood but _someone else’s_ life.” He hears the sharp intake of breath and hurries on. “Snoke’s life. If I — if I take just enough blood from her. It will make me much, much stronger. Without hurting her ability to fight. And between the two of us, I believe we can kill Snoke and exterminate his court.”

 _“Oh,”_ Rey says, one finger pointing at him excitedly. _“Oh,_ I see. Like how we could take out twelve, even though my record is four. But why would my blood make you stronger?”

“You fought together?” his mother asks, in exactly the same tone in which she used to say things like, _you lit a fire in the kitchen sink?_ And Ben answers the way his father always did: by changing the subject as soon as possible.

“Yes. A Slayer’s blood isn’t the key to her strength, but it does have powerful magic. Some of the strongest dark spells in existence call for the blood of a Slayer. Vampires who drink from Slayers have done things they couldn’t possibly have done otherwise.”

“Those vampires drink _fatal amounts,”_ his mother says sharply.

“The Master of Aurelius drank from Buffy Summers and she survived,” he says, counting on his fingers. “Claudette Nfah survived the Butcher of Douala. Lakshmi Murbadkar survived St. John Khuni. Ibn-Dam drank enough from Khadija Alkunti that he thought he’d killed her; he was boasting about it when she killed him. The entire Order of the Green Knife drank from Lila Ruiz and she lived to kill them all.”

“She died two days later. Buffy died on the spot, and was saved by medical intervention.”

“She died of drowning, not blood loss!” His fist rattles the plates and cutlery as it pounds the table. She knows this. He knows she knows this.

“No,” Leah says, with finality. Her hand covers the text of his translation, as if the wait staff might read it as they squeeze between the tables. “There’s too much ambiguity, and I won’t gamble with my Slayer’s safety.”

“I do dangerous things all the time,” Rey protests.

“Not as dangerous as Snoke,” his mother says. “Not as dangerous as that.”

“And by _that_ you mean me.”

“You look like my son. You know what he knew, and I think perhaps you feel what he… would have felt. But there is a demon inside you, and it is the demon that will grow stronger on the blood of a Slayer, and I do not trust the demon. Do you think I haven’t noticed that when you realized you were wrong, you moved to a second plan which also, strangely, involves feeding off Rey?”

“I’d never do anything to hurt my Slayer,” he says, and she looks at him. It feels like the first time all night that she really looks at him. Maybe the first time in thirty years, since he was six years old and woke up with a vision in the middle of the night, and she held his arms and searched his face.

“So you do still think you’re a Watcher.”

“No,” he says, because he knows he failed in his duty, and he’s a monster now, and then, “Yes,” because she asked what he thought, not what he knew, and he can’t help it. He thinks like a Watcher. _“Give me no hope of honor or forgiveness,”_ he says, _“and let the grave erase my name._ But you can’t stop me being what I am.”

* * *

Rey sees Leah take an unsteady breath. She’s been breathing steadily this whole time — much more steadily than any other time Rey’s spoken to her, probably more steadily than any human being not exerting their whole willpower in the effort possibly could. “You think you’re a Watcher,” she says. “But can you ask me to trust you to behave as a Watcher would?”

“He has a soul,” Rey protests.

“There’s still a demon in him.”

“There’s a demon in her, too,” Ben says challengingly, and Rey swallows. _There’s a demon inside you,_ he said the first night she met him. _Demons and death. Just like me._

“Kuptar-Makubalu is a _fringe theory — ”_

“Only to the Western Council,” Ben scoffs. “All the scholarship from the Independent Council virtually assumes it. That’s why she’s running such a calorie deficit,” he says, and points at her empty plates and cups. “The pneumenurgy of adhesion. And I,” he says, leaning forward, “am in a position to smell that it’s true.”

“What does that mean?” Rey demands, bewildered. “Does that mean I’m part demon?”

“No,” Leah says. “Stop frightening my Slayer.”

“Why don’t you tell the Council to stop starving _my_ Slayer?”

“She is not yours; you have no right to call her yours.”

Ben growls, a deep inhuman growl. Rey blushes. She shouldn’t. This is supposed to be a problem-solving, peace-making meeting, and they’re dissolving into shouting, and Leah is being so harsh when two hours ago when Rey got her to agree to this her lips were trembling, and Ben is talking about _eating_ her. But — mostly being the Slayer is work. She fights hard, and then she gets horny, and then she feels like a freak. She does everything she can and gives it everything she’s got, and it isn’t ever enough. She can’t kill enough of the vampires; she isn’t good enough. But the way they say _my Slayer_ — 

“Rey, are you hungry frequently?” Leah asks, frowning.

“Yeah,” Rey says, shrugging. She pushes down the guilty warmth she feels when they talk like she’s something worth _coveting,_ , and tries to stick to practicalities. “But like… it’s not like I get _no_ food. And I worry about rent first, you know?”

Leah’s frown deepens. “That is… concerning.”

“Yes,” Ben growls from across the table. “It is.”

“What does it mean, though, that I’m part demon?”

“You’re not part demon,” he says shortly. “Your power is fueled by the thaumaturgic binding of a demonic spirit to your living humanity. They repel each other, and it generates power. The demonic presence in combination with the natural repellence makes you want to kill demons, specifically.”

“Whereas the demon in _him_ wants to kill humans,” Leah says sharply.

Rey expects Ben to snap back, but he just drops his head. “Yes,” he says, and swallows. “Yes, I want that. I’ve done it. A soul doesn’t make you a good person. I got my soul back, and I kept on doing evil things. But I — didn’t want to and I — ” He drops his head even lower, and his voice breaks. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

For a moment every sound in the cafe, every bit of chatter and clatter, seems to fall away, and the silence between Leah and Ben is the only real thing in the world. Then Ben’s shoulders heave and he hurries on. “I know that isn’t enough; I know you don’t care that I’m sorry and it doesn’t change anything; I _know._ But please believe me. I won’t hurt her.” He looks up, and his eyes turn to Rey. They make her lick her lips for the memory of chocolate. “I want to help.”

Rey doesn’t realize she’s staring back until she’s sees Leah’s eyes flicker back and forth between them in her peripheral vision. She sits back in her chair, but Leah is already getting up. “There are — too many unknowns here,” she says, putting the translation in her pocket and stumbling on her words in a way that startles Rey. Leah never stumbles. “The Codex mentions you, and it mentions a Slayer. But it might not be Rey. You’re a vampire; you might live another 500 years. It might be another Slayer entirely.”

Ben doesn’t get up. “No,” is all he says.

“I know why you say that,” Leah says, in a tone Rey can’t decode at all. Whatever she means, it makes Ben look down at his hands.

“Snoke wants me to kill her,” Ben says. “If I don’t, he’ll try other ways. He’ll come after her himself. And not alone.”

Leah swallows. “I see.”

Ben gets to his feet. “So you can believe my reading, and follow my plan. Or you can make another. But you do need a plan.”

“We’ll see,” is all his mother says.

* * *

He goes south and east, turning the corner and headed for the B at 110th, walking beside the high stone wall of the cathedral garden. He smells her on the cold wind that stirs the street. She catches him before he can even turn. “So,” she says, mock-conversationally, “some new information for me there, huh? Didn’t think to drop me a text or anything? ‘BTW my new good idea is drinking your blood’ or something?”

“Sorry,” he says, hunching his shoulders.

“‘Oh and also you have superpowers because there’s a demon stuck to your soul. Plus you need a special Slayer diet.’”

“You don’t need a special diet. You just need food. When you get hungry, you need to be able to eat until you’re not hungry anymore.” She rolls her eyes like that’s a ludicrous proposition. “And there isn’t a demon stuck to your soul. It’s just… Slayers are unique. There has always been a Slayer, and she has always had a Watcher, and nobody knows which came first or how or why. And the Western Watchers’ Council has embraced one theory, but I don’t believe it.”

“And what’s the Western Council, or the… Independent Council? I thought there was only one Watchers’ Council.”

“There is only one. Now. For millennia, the Watchers’ Council was a global alliance, a network of people committed to sharing knowledge. But there are always shifts, and power struggles. Empire-building often means the consolidation of knowledge in imperial capitals. But the rise of European imperialism, was… something else. European Watchers used their countries’ armies to forcibly extract books and learning. Instead of assigning local Watchers to Slayers on other continents, they’d send Watchers from Europe.”

“So basically, like… Watcher colonialism.”

“Yeah. Watchers aren’t immune to world events, or white supremacy, or war. The Council tore itself apart. The Western Council was centralized in England, with a formal academy and a great library. Which they built partly from stolen books. So the Watchers in the countries that were being colonized — they decentralized, and they converted a lot of their knowledge from written texts to magically-augmented oral information. They’d hide local Potentials, and work with them in secret.”

“And that’s the Independent Council.”

“Yeah.”

“But now there’s only one?”

“Yeah. Because, see, when there’d be a Potential in Australia or Congo or something, the Western Watchers’ Council wouldn’t know about it. There’d just be a gap in their records. And the other way around. When there was a Slayer in Germany or something, the Independent Council wouldn’t know about. So they were both kind of fucked. And around the time of Indian Independence, the Western Council was like, fine, we give up. And they came to all these agreements and merged and Watchers still fight all the time but we all share what we know. But for like four centuries, they didn’t.”

“And you think the Independent Council knew better?”

“About what makes a Slayer, yes.”

“Which is demons and death,” she says. She sounds skeptical. But her face is drawn. His mother was right; he is scaring her.

“The Western Council always wanted to believe that in the whole landscape of humans and demons and all the hybrids that haunt the earth, the Slayer is something else. Divine intervention. An angel. The Independent Council says no. You belong to the world like everyone else. You’re an adaptation, a survival mechanism. A vampire is a demon using a human body. But a Slayer is a human use for demonic power. The death of the last Slayer is what passes the power on. But it’s bound to your life; it comes to you because you’re alive. Not like me.”

She bites her lip. Her cheeks and nose are turning red in the cold. “But you said,” she hesitates. “You said we were the same.”

“We are. Just… inverses. Mirror images.”

“What about.” She bites her lip again.

“What about what?”

“You said. Before. You said. Emptiness.” She reaches out. Doesn’t quite touch his chest. “Hollowness.”

“Not because you’re a Slayer, Rey. Just because you’re lonely.” He takes her hand and turns it palm up. He lays his own over it, so that the heel of his hand fits into her warm fingers, and both their fingertips touch the other’s wrist. “Sometimes,” he says thickly. “Hollow things can fit together.”

She stares down at their hands, and he feels her fingers move, just a little. To fit themselves around his wrist with that iron grasp of hers. And he seizes her wrist too and pulls her close against him. “Rey. My mother is wrong. If I die, you can get another Watcher, but if you die… there isn’t another Slayer, Rey. Do you understand? If I’m a Watcher then you’re my Slayer. My only one.”

“Yes,” she whispers, and he kisses her. Her hand comes around the back of his head and holds him fast. “I need you to help me with something,” she says. “And then I’ll come with you and I’ll help you kill Snoke. Okay?”

She’s shivering. He can’t keep her warm. “Yes.” Anything.

“Meet me at 46 Church tomorrow night.” She kisses him again, and lets him go. She walks away, and he stays where she leaves him.

 _You will fail._ Uncle Luke told them in his class. _Every Watcher fails, because every Slayer dies. But if you are alert and diligent and dutiful, you will have years with her. And if you are lucky, you will kill the thing that kills her._ He’d cried, as if he weren’t a professor, standing in front of a class of Watchers, as if he were alone. _And if you are very, very lucky, then you will die saving her life._

But it comes to him as a cold chill that there can only be one way that she’d do this in defiance of his mother, and put her life into his hands.

She trusts him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> That’s their way out, tonight. Don’t think. Don’t anticipate the pain. Just feel. Just go.
> 
> “Ready?” Rey asks, looking up from her phone. “Poe’s in place. Rose says she and Finn are set.”
> 
> “Ready,” he says, and she hits him in the face.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Lúdláb torta, or goosefoot cake, is a cocoa sponge cake with rum-soaked sour cherries in a chocolate cream filling and dark chocolate frosting. Isler cookies (pronounced ishler) are big chocolate-covered sandwich cookies. The ladies behind the counter at the Hungarian Pastry Shop take a keen interest in when the scholars who study there will publish because they maintain a proud collection of the dust jackets of books which have been written at their tables. I want to go there so badly I could fucking cry, as you can probably tell from this chapter.
> 
> 46 Church Avenue, I should note, is not a real address. Phoenicio-Punic, however, is a real language, also known as Canaanite or simply Punic, used by the people of Ancient Carthage and related to Hebrew and Arabic. It does have a known grammar but in the age of COVID I don't have a good way to research that grammar, so I am a little bit generalizing from what I know about Hebrew and Arabic, and a little bit... making shit up to suit my purposes. I think this puts me roughly on par with your average Buffy script writer. My apologies to the people of Ancient Carthage, though.
> 
> My thanks as always to [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/Bombastique1)) for reading, patience, and encouragement.


	14. Chomp

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> “Aren’t they waiting for you? Won’t they be suspicious if they see you come in the building with me and then you don’t show?” 
> 
> “They are waiting. But they won’t be very suspicious.” 
> 
> “Why not? Do they trust you that much?” If they trust him that much, should _she_ – it’s not that she doesn’t because she does; he kissed her and he pressed his hand against hers and he said – 
> 
> “They trust me that little.” There’s a feeble little smile on his mouth, and he swallows hard. “There’s uh. Vampire… folk wisdom.” He’s not meeting her eyes now. “That a Slayer’s blood is a. An aphrodisiac. So they’ll think I’m doing… what I’d like to do if you’ll let me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that there are two new tags on this story: one for needles and one for mirror sex. One of these is explored in much more detail than the other.

Kylo climbs up the stairs of 46 Church, falling a few steps behind Rey out of the absolutely craven motive of watching her ass as she heads briskly upwards. He needs to get his bloodlust on, he rationalizes, but not too seriously. A little bit of lust-lust will help keep him where he needs to be. And it keeps his brain pleasantly empty; if he lets it fill with everything they’ve planned to do tonight, he’ll be too afraid to do anything.

That’s their way out, tonight. Don’t think. Don’t anticipate the pain. Just feel. Just go.

“Ready?” Rey asks, looking up from her phone. “Poe’s in place. Rose says she and Finn are set.”

“Ready,” he says, and she hits him in the face.

His head snaps back, and he snarls, demon face emerging. That hurt. He lunges for her.

“Hey!” she hollers at the top of her lungs, and ducks. “Hey you! Stop that!” She bangs against the first apartment door, and kicks out at him. He reaches for her, and she ducks under his arm and socks him in the chest. If she had a stake, he’d be dead. Of course, if he were really trying, she might be too.

She bangs at the second door, and he drags her back against the wall. She throws him off, straight into the door of the third apartment. By the time he’s elbow-checked in her direction and hit the door of #5, doors are opening; people are leaning out, looking to see what the noise is. When he slams her into the door of the ninth apartment, some noble soul tries to intervene; Kylo snarls, yellow eyes harsh and fangs shining in the light. The poor bastard flops backwards with the lightest push Kylo can manage.

People gasp, people scream. Someone yells, _anybody got a gun?_ And no bullet can kill Kylo Ren but that doesn’t mean he’s fine with being shot; he growls at Rey and she runs for the stairs at the other end of the corridor. Finn hears his cue as she clatters down the stairs, and runs up; Kylo trades Rey for Finn, and drags him up into the corridor. Finn digs in his pocket as Kylo pulls his head back and pretends to prepare to bite down — God he does smell good though — and then Finn shoves an honestly unnecessarily large bulb of garlic in Kylo’s face.

Kylo staggers backwards and Finn presses him with the garlic until he’s driven him back to the top of the stairs. Kylo turns and runs down them, and Rey’s waiting for him at the bottom, to throw a punch at his head that misses but knocks on a door. He hears Finn upstairs, explaining: _Vampire. She’s basically the only one who can kill them. Garlic keeps them away._ Then Rey hits him again, and they do it all over, except it’s Rose waiting for them on the stairs down from this floor. And then they do it again, except it’s Poe — who throws a fucking _handful of lentils_ on the floor and laughs as Kylo slips and curses. (The temptation to actually bite is much higher after that stunt.) By the time Poe’s warded him off, Finn’s done with his top-floor informational lecture and waiting for him at the stairs again.

Kylo doesn’t let himself think, so he doesn’t think about the look in Finn’s eyes when he grabs him. Or why Poe’s laugh is so bitter. He just follows Rey. From floor to floor, showing off his teeth and his strength and his cruel yellow eyes.

He follows her when she bursts out the front door and onto the street. They can’t linger in the building Snoke owns; they have to trust to Finn and Rose and Poe to handle the chaos they’ve caused. 

Rey zigs and zags and bolts and darts until she dead-ends them in a trash alcove a block east of Ocean Parkway. She catches herself against the wall, and catches him by the lapels of his coat.

“You okay?” she asks, getting her wind back.

“Fine,” he says, and cracks his neck as he lets his face lapse back into humanity. “Might have some bruises, but nothing I can’t work through. What the fuck was up with Poe and the… peas?”

“Just testing a theory,” she says. “You didn’t stop and count them, so I guess it didn’t work.” She starts to shoulder off her jacket. The long-sleeve tee underneath is thin and clinging. “So we doing this now?”

He puts his hand on her shoulder, keeping the jacket on her. “No. We fake it now. We’ll do it in the building.”

“The sooner you do it, the sooner I can start healing.”

“The sooner I do it, the sooner your adrenaline floods. You want to save that rush for the fight.”

“Fine,” she says, and shrugs the coat back on. “So how should we get there? Fireman’s carry?” She offers her arms. It almost reminds him of a child, asking to be picked up.

“No,” he says, and sweeps her up with a hand behind her knees and one behind her back. She gives a tiny shriek of surprise. Very tiny. Just a little _meep_ before she seals her lips over it. Her face is right in front of his, and her arms go around his neck. Like it was an instinct. He looks into her big hazel eyes. It’s dark, at night, in the shadow of the alcove. Her eyes are dark, and shining.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he whispers.

“That’s the fourth time you’ve asked,” she snorts. “Yeah, I’m sure. And then when Snoke is dead I can have a nap, right?”

“Right.”

“Totally worth the chomp,” she says, smiling, and he can barely stand it.

“Put your head down,” he says. “Go limp and lean against me. So maybe you’re half-dead but maybe you’re just drunk. We don’t really need the NYPD involved.”

She tucks her face into his chest. It’s so trusting it makes his heart hurt, and the ache is so sweet he worries for his soul. Trust and love, Angel warned him. _She trusts me but she doesn’t love me,_ he tells himself. He makes the thought into a needle and jabs it into his arm as he carries her towards what might be her death. _She trusts you; a Slayer should trust her Watcher. It’s your duty to make sure she’s safe and well, that she’s not alone in her fight against the powers of darkness. So she needs to eat, and you feed her. She needs to come, and you fuck her. You take care of her. It’s your duty._

Against his chest, Rey hums faintly. _I’m just a little lamb lost in the woods. I know I could. Be very good._

But he’s a monster. Part of him will always want to kill her, and she has to know it. He’s half-cracked, split down the middle, and she doesn’t love him.

Not the way he loves her.

* * *

It’s weirdly soothing, the bump-bump-bump of Ben carrying her down the sidewalk. He doesn’t have a heartbeat to lull her, but his body’s out-of-habit breathing makes his chest rise and fall. She’s a little wired from six floors of play-fighting, and she can smile for Ben, but if she said she wasn’t scared, she’d be lying.

What if he takes too much, and she’s not strong enough? What if he worries about her and he takes too little, and _he’s_ not strong enough? What if she suddenly gets squeamish and faints and he has to sit there and wait for her to wake up? What if it hurts? It’s definitely going to hurt. What if it hurts too much and she does something embarrassing like scream or cry when she’s supposed to be being her best Slayer self? And what if he — 

But he wouldn’t.

He held her hand. He kissed her. He told her she was the only one for him, and they fit together. So he loves her. And he won’t hurt her.

And that’s that. So she doesn’t need to think about it anymore. She presses her face a little closer against his chest, and hums instead of thinking.

The heavier traffic of the parkway is unmissable. Ben pauses for the light, and Rey whispers, “Will you say something?”

“Like what?” he asks, looking left and right.

“Anything,” she says. She just wants the rumble of his voice to help shake off her nerves. Keep her from thinking too hard. About anything.

He takes a breath, and steps into the street. “This is my oath as a Watcher; to give evil no quarter nor refuge, to admit no harm to the innocent, to put my learning in service of the Slayer and be a guard to her — ”

“Not that.”

“Why not?”

 _Because it hurts you. Because I don’t want an oath you took before you met me to be why you’re holding me._ “Don’t you know anything else by heart?”

“Amo,” he sighs, “amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant. Ani shamarti, ata shamarta, at shamart, hu shamar, hi shamra, anachnu shamarnu… ”

It’s gibberish, but with her ear against his chest, it’s a pleasant buzz. Things he knows. Things that come to his mind.

“I have to get my keys out,” he says, after a minute. His voice is still soft, but she can feel how tense he is, all over. “We’re almost in the building; the surveillance cameras are on us. I’m going to put you over my shoulder, okay? Stay limp.”

Some part of her bristles, because she’s the _Slayer;_ her thing isn’t really _playing dead._ She’s more about making other things _be_ dead. She does her best to be a rag doll, but it’s hard when his big shoulder shoves all the wind out of her. “Sorry,” he mumbles apologetically, as he unlocks the door. And she can tell he’s careful not to knock her head against the frame on the way in.

He pauses after a few steps inside, and she hears him press a button. It makes sense that vampires would prize basement real estate, where they don’t have to worry about accidental sunlight exposure. But are they really going straight down there? When is he going to — 

“Shhh,” he murmurs. She must be squirming, and she tries to make herself limp again. Her heart is going crazy. He should have just bitten her in the garbage alcove — 

The elevator door opens; Ben steps through and sighs. “I broke the camera in here last week. I was aiming for Hux, but it all worked out in the end I guess.” Rey turns her head, looking for the camera, and keyed up as she is, she can’t help it: she laughs. Because it’s a nice building and the elevator is nice, too, with mirrors on three sides. Rey is floating in empty air.

Empty air puts her on her feet, and Ben is really there, of course, punching a quick series of elevator buttons. But there’s only one of him, and there are so many of Rey. He turns back to her, and she’s not laughing anymore.

“So you’re going to do it now,” she says, as a statement, and swallows. She starts to take off her coat, and changes her mind. If she faints he won’t be able to put her back into it, and if she’s going to die here tonight, she’s going to die in her good fucking coat. She pulls it off one shoulder and turns her head away. Shuts her eyes for good measure. “Count of three?”

His big cool hand settles on her neck, where she was expecting his teeth. “Rey,” he says, and she turns back to look at him. He’s looking at her with dark, somber eyes.

“Aren’t they waiting for you? Won’t they be suspicious if they see you come in the building with me and then you don’t show?”

“They are waiting. But they won’t be very suspicious.”

“Why not? Do they trust you that much?” If they trust him that much, should _she_ — it’s not that she doesn’t because she does; he kissed her and he pressed his hand against hers and he said — 

“They trust me that little.” There’s a feeble little smile on his mouth, and he swallows hard. “There’s uh. Vampire… folk wisdom.” He’s not meeting her eyes now. “That a Slayer’s blood is a. An aphrodisiac. So they’ll think I’m doing… what I’d like to do if you’ll let me.”

* * *

He can see the disgust bloom on her face, and it’s only natural. He forces himself not to retreat from her. This is what vampires are; he’s a vampire. He makes himself bear the look she’s giving him, because he doesn’t deserve to evade it.

“Aren’t I supposed to be _dead?”_ she asks, mouth twisting.

“Only… mostly dead,” he says, and can’t help closing his eyes for an instant. “I’m supposed to do the actual killing in front of Snoke. So he gets his Hellmouth where he wants it.”

“And wait, you want to actually… now?” He halfway expected her to be backing into a corner by now, ready to change her mind about everything. But she stays where she was, looking up at him, only sounding a little bewildered. Because she trusts him.

He wants her to trust him. He tries to swallow down his shame. “It’s not — it’s not that _I_ want — but I don’t want to hurt you, Rey. And if I can make you — if I can make you feel good just before I — it won’t hurt so much.”

“It won’t?” He shakes his head. “And I guess it gives Poe and Rose and Finn time to get in place. Is it true though? About… my blood?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. In Watcher records, vampires have been known to get a bit… active after drinking from Slayers. But vampires have also been known to get off on killing. It’s hard to say what causes what.

“If it is, then, you _will_ want to, right?”

Yes. But. “It’s never that hard to twist my arm. Is it?”

She looks up at him seriously. “It’ll really make it hurt less?”

“Yes,” he promises, and steps a little closer. “I know you usually need it after a fight, not before, but.” She doesn’t step away. He puts his hands on her waist. “We had something like a fight, didn’t we?”

She snorts. A puff of warmth against his chest. “That? That was six floors of warm-up exercises.”

“Well,” he says, and slides his hands to her hips. “If it helps. You can pull my hair as hard as you want.”

“Oh yeah?”

He gets down on his knees and unbuttons her jeans. “You can squeeze your legs around my neck as hard as you want, too.”

“Right,” she sighs. “The upside of a boytoy who doesn’t need to breathe.”

“I’m thirteen years older than you,” he says reprovingly. He takes off his coat and drops it to the side with a muffled clank.

“If we survive, do you promise to keep doing this?” She’s trying to be playful, to cover the fear she’s still feeling. “Can I have a thirty-six-year-old boytoy when I’m sixty-five?”

“If you still want to,” he says, to cover the strange way it hurts. If he does well, if he is alert and diligent, she will survive. But she’ll move through time without him. He’ll stay trapped forever in the moment when he failed everyone he loved, and she’ll go on, growing like a plant towards the sun.

But only if he gets her out of this alive.

“Don’t think,” he tells her, repeating his advice to himself as he pulls away her clothing. She runs her fingers through his hair; he’s trying to concentrate on getting her naked enough, but he can’t help leaning a little bit into the stroke of her hand.

He picks her up and sets her against the wall of the elevator, propped on the handrail; she hisses a little, probably with the cold of the metal. He pushes his shoulders up under her thighs, and she digs her fingers hard into his hair. There. There’s his girl. His bloody, merciless Slayer.

“That’s right,” he croons. “Hard as you want,” and he licks her. Her grip tightens, and he closes his eyes. Hot chocolate tastes like nothing, but Rey tastes like everything: tart and salty and the faintest trace of iron. He’s tasted her blood once; next to that, this is milk compared with wine. But he’s still parched. He spreads her with his thumbs and licks deeper; she gasps.

“I can’t see you in the mirror,” she says, breathing hard. Her cunt pulses under his tongue.

It takes him a moment to process why she’d say that, what she must be seeing, and why it’s making her drip. When he does, he growls and shoulders her legs further apart. She wants to watch her little pussy clench? He can give her a show. She gives a little moan, seeing herself get spread, and he wants to see her see it. 

She’s getting so wet for him. He wants to pin her in place and tease her and let her trickle down his chin. But she won’t let him; she’s clawing at him, grinding herself against his mouth. She’s so soft, plump and blooming with arousal, and her blood is so close to the skin. He’s so hungry, and she’s going to feed him.

He’s hard, too. Aching in his pants as his teeth ache with the urge to sharpen and pierce. Rey can’t see it but she knows. Maybe she can smell the pre-come. Maybe she just knows him that well.

“You want to fuck me?” she asks, almost taunting. “You want to bite me?” And he does, he does; he sucks on her and growls in his throat until her hips jerk and he hears her elbows bang against the mirror as her back bends and she comes on his famished lips.

He jumps up, the crunch of his shifting bone already a relief, but before he can take advantage of the few seconds of euphoria that will numb her, she throws her arms around his neck and her legs around his middle and drags him close. “Fuck me,” she orders him, her voice hoarse and wild, and he wants to, and a second orgasm will be as good as the first, and he’s ordered himself not to think. 

He staggers into the middle of the elevator, and now he can see over her shoulder the reflection of her back, and also, smaller, of what she sees, and it makes him harder than he ever been, alive or dead. His beautiful Slayer, legs wrapped around nothing, grinding on nothing, her ass dimpled by his grasping fingers. He drops her a little down his body so he can slide his fingers against her. He works one into her, watching in the mirror as it opens her up. He knows his face is a demon’s face, and his body is a dead man’s body, but he doesn’t have to see that, in the mirror. Just her.

"Look at yourself," he grunts. "Spread and pinned. Can't see my fingers working you open... just a desperate, hungry little cunt.” He mouths at her collarbone as he unbuckles his belt. "Let's give that little cunt what it wants, huh? Watch it get fucked open by nothing."

He's entranced. Just the reflection of a reflection, but the way her head is tilted back, the way she opens for him. Wide eyes and spread legs. The demon in him is alive and hungry; he loves the guilty way she stares over his shoulder, the indecent way she clings. He fits himself against her and God, it does feel like she's hungry. Like she's sucking him in. She whimpers and claws at the back of his neck as he sinks in, gritting, "Watch. That dirty girl. Get fucked."

She does watch. He loves it. He’s always felt a frisson of taboo in fucking his Slayer, but somehow never more than now, watching her watch her Watcher fuck her. But he’s not there; she’s being fucked by nothing, bouncing and whimpering on an incubus’s cock, little pussy stretched by a thick invisible force like she's being fucked by evil itself.

She presses herself closer, her warm face against the side of his head. Her hands are feverishly hot on the back of his neck and her cunt is molten. She grips him; she’s so strong. In the mirror, he sees her mouth open and her eyes flutter. He has a sudden flash of her mouth last night, messy with chocolate and greed. He’s ravenous. He’s losing his mind, tearing into pieces.

“Come for me,” he snarls. He needs her to, because he can’t let this hurt her, but he can’t wait. He shoves her collar aside, and she drops her neck, presenting a long, bare, inviting curve. He can smell it. He needs her to come, and he jerks his hips and tries to push her there, but he can’t wait and he can’t help it and his jaws close on that naked throat. She convulses, her cunt squeezing him, and the shudder of it feels like helpless, struggling prey, and his fangs sink through her soft flesh and the warm spurt of her blood fills his mouth. 

She gasps. He hears it like it’s far away. Like he doesn’t care. He has everything he’s ever wanted. He twitches inside her, and his teeth settle deeper into her throat. The fresh gush of it wets his lips, threads a fine liquid line down his chin as he sucks it out of her faster than he can swallow. And he swallows greedily. Her pulse flutters in his hands, and he thrusts his cock into her with mindless savagery.

Nothing can be better than this, to taste her twice at the same time. Ecstasy scalding every sense.

He could swear he tastes chocolate in her blood.

The only thing that keeps alive the soft pulsing ache that tethers his soul to his body, is fear. Not of the stake in her pocket or the vampire court waiting below. The soft whimper of her voice in his ear, the way her fingers dig into his shoulder, the way her cunt squeezes and squeezes him — if he wanted to be perfectly happy, he'd have to be sure they were from pleasure. He's afraid he bit too soon, before she was high enough to be numb. He’s afraid he’s hurting her.

She trusted him. He can't trust himself.

He has to lift his mouth to ask her. It's like ripping himself apart, to break the electrifying circuit of pleasure. His thrusts slow. "Rey?” he asks hoarsely, “Are you all right?"

She makes a hurt little choking noise that turns his heart cold before she sighs. "Yes. Yes. I'm all right."

The wound he's left in the slope of her neck will scar. The idea makes his cock pulse. Or maybe it's the power that's starting to flood his veins. He licks the bleeding edge of the puncture and shivers. It feels like there's a furnace in his chest, starting to glow and heat. He could push her against the wall and fuck her until the mirrors shatter. Fuck her, fill her full of come, get whatever he wants from her soft, warm body.

"I could kill anything now," he breathes, and he wants to mean Snoke. She squirms in his arms and he smells her fear. He almost comes, almost snaps and holds her down and makes his frightened little Slayer take it all. He hates himself. He pulls away, but she tightens her legs and doesn't let him.

"You need to come," she says, and he hates himself more. The way she cares about him, when he is what he is.

"No I don't."

“You do,” she says, and she’s still riding him, and he wants to. “You want them to think you stopped halfway through? Won’t they be able to smell that you didn’t finish?”

She has a point, and she’s so tight and wet around him. He wants to give in, and be persuaded. But he’s still afraid. She feels so good, and his tongue is still coated in the best thing he’s ever had. If he loses his soul, what will he do? What will he do to her?

 _Trust and love,_ he reminds himself. _She trusts you, but she doesn’t love you._ That’s what he has to remember, and that’s how it should be. “It’s all right,” he mutters aloud, reassuring himself. “You don’t love me, Rey. Shouldn’t love me. Just trust me. Okay?”

“Okay,” she says softly, and something sad flickers over her face. It’s just like her; she’s so vicious when she fights, and so tender she has pity for a monster with a soul. She wraps her legs tighter around him and presses her face down into his shoulder, urging him back into rhythm with her hips. “Come for me,” she whispers. A gentle command, her lips against his skin. “Please. Come inside me, Ben.”

He does, thrusting brutally deep and sucking his own teeth for the last drops of her. He fucks her like a monster and she takes it with her hand on his back between his shoulder blades, and he doesn't stop until he's come. He’s a monster, and he lets her go on fucking him like he's a man, and that's what makes him worse than anything.

When he finishes, he's dripping with her blood, she's dripping with his come, and the demon in him basks like a cat in sunlight. He feels drunk, and high, and miserable. He lets her go as gently as he can, as if that could make up for it. She starts to fix her clothes, looking away from him, and he stops her. “Let me,” he says, mumbling. She’ll do too good a job if she does it herself. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she says. He’s shaking a little, buzzing with power and energy. Her hands are shaking, too. Everything he has, he’s taken from her.

* * *

It shouldn’t bother her so much. She’s probably five minutes from violent death. And it was dumb of her to think that a kiss on 110th would mean love when a kiss in a subway pump room hadn’t. She should have put it together, the way he always talks about sex. Kissing is just part of sex, and sex is just a maintenance duty to him. A service he provides his Slayer because she needs it.

But his hand on hers — _sometimes hollow things can fit together_ — she thought — 

He puts his hand on her face, and she looks up into his eyes. They’re yellow, and his teeth are vicious and barely clean of her blood. But somehow he looks soft even so, even before his face slips back into his human shape, and his eyes are liquid brown again.

“Focus on healing,” he says gently. “Let me carry you like I was before. Even a second of rest will help.” She nods, and she sees his soft lips tremble. “Rey,” he says softly. “Whatever happens here tonight. I want you to know.” He swallows hard. “I’ve failed you in so many ways, and I’ve never deserved it, but… it’s been the honor of my life to be your Watcher.”

She throws her arms around him. Maybe he doesn’t love her the way she thought he might ( _the way she wanted him to_ — she takes that pain away, locks it up where she doesn’t have to look at it) but he does care. He’s worked and studied his whole life to be this for somebody, and he wants to be this for _her._ He’s _proud_ to be this for her. Proud of her.

“Let’s smash some evil dead,” she says lightly. He was right, he adrenaline is spiking. She adjusts the stake in her jacket pocket so it won’t fall out. He punches the activation code into the elevator and sweeps her up into his arms. It would be comforting, being held this close, if she weren’t so ready to kill something.

“Relax,” he murmurs, as the elevator carries them down. “Heal.”

 _“You_ relax,” she grumbles back, but then the doors are opening, and she has to do her best to go limp.

He carries her down a chilly corridor, and she can hear voices. It reeks of vampire. Her nose twitches, and she tries to focus on holding still. Healing.

She feels Ben turn a corner, and then the smell is overwhelming and the voices are loud, and it’s everything she can do to stay limp.

“I told you I would,” Ben says, and the room goes completely silent. One of the vampires gasps, and another one swears under their breath. She can smell them. She can hear them. She itches to be on her feet and fighting. But they have to get near Snoke, or else the court will block them and he’ll flee while they’re fighting. Which would mean setting him loose on Poe and Rose and Finn, who by now should be waiting outside the exit. So she stays still.

“Indeed,” says a voice. The voice chills her; it’s rasping, like an old man’s, and British, and cruel. “You told me, and it was foretold.”

“Still a bit of a shock,” says a woman’s voice, arch and chilly and also British-sounding.

“She’s not dead,” says another man, sharper and _also_ British; does this guy import all his vampires across the Atlantic?

“Of course she’s not,” Ben retorts. The rumble of his voice soothes her a little. Helps her hold still. “Where I take her life, the Hellmouth opens. I told Master Snoke I’d bring her to him.”

“And so you did,” says the rasping voice, who must be Snoke, the way he oozes condescending pleasure at that. “Well done, Kylo Ren.”

“Thank you, Master,” Ben says.

“Phasma, the needle,” Snoke orders, and Rey feels Ben freeze.

“Needle?” is all he says.

“Just a little something I had a warlock cook up for us,” Snoke says pleasantly. There are steps — someone with a long stride. “I wanted her out of the way, of course, but if her death opens the Hellmouth, I’d rather she not die too immediately.”

Ben hunches himself over, and she hears the sound of his fangs emerging. “She’s my kill,” he snarls, as panic begins to flood into Rey’s half-bled body. “Don’t want her poisoned.”

“It’s not poison,” the woman — Phasma? Has she heard that name before? — replies suavely. “It’s just a sort of… magical leech. It drains away everything _but_ her life.”

Ben takes several jerking steps. “This is a plot. You never liked me, Phasma. You’re trying to poison me through the Slayer. So you’ll be rid of me once I’ve killed her.”

“The potion was made at my request, Kylo Ren. If the prophecy means what you say it means, you need not drink from her again. Only take her life.” Snoke’s voice is closer now, hard and hissing. “Now bring her here.”

Ben takes three more long, slow steps. “All right,” he says slowly. “All right. _Now.”_

He drops her. She lands in a crouch and looks up; above her head, he’s holding what looks like a claw in both hands. The claw is clutching a hypodermic needle, and the hairless, warped face the claw belongs to is snarling in rage. Rey whips the stake out of her pocket.

“I knew it!” Phasma screams. “I knew! _Watcher!”_

Rey can’t reach the heart from where she’s trapped between their feet, so she just stabs the stake into Snoke’s thigh. He howls; the needle goes flying, and so does Ben. Rey rolls away. Everyone is coming for them.

“Ben!” she cries and he leaps to his feet, reaching inside his coat. With a nasty rip, he tears her sword from its hiding place in the lining and throws it across the basement. It lands in her hand with a satisfying _thwack._ The nearest vamp loses his head, and she is officially back on her bullshit.

 _God,_ it feels good.

* * *

Finn puts the knife in his left hand and the stake in his right, then switches. And switches back. Poe toys with the handle of the hubcap axe, and looks over his shoulder again at where the Falcon’s double-parked. Rose is the only one of them who’s still, completely frozen, kneeling on the ground in the little tunnel that leads to the basement exit. The elements of her spells are laid out in front of her, ready to be cast.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asks, not looking up. She asked him once, when he proposed his plan, and hasn’t questioned him since.

“Yes,” he says, and tries to be sure. She looks up at him for a moment, steadily.

“And it has to be her?”

“I want it to be her.”

“All right,” she says, and turns back to her spell. “Just say when.”

* * *

He gets his weapon from the outstretched arm of a pathetic little vamp who can barely get back into her human face but was the first to find a way to break herself off a stake and come for him. He takes it from her without trouble and sticks it in her heart without much more trouble. Good; he was worried he was out of practice. Rey’s fighting her way back towards Snoke, a tornado like always, whirling this way and that with her little human teeth bared and her sword flashing. She’s doing well, too, as he knew she would; she doesn’t leave them all dust, but Ochi’s going to have to struggle to make much impact in this fight with no legs and only half a jaw.

(He’s never even had to remind her to sharpen her weapons. She’s so good.)

But she can’t take Snoke alone. Even wounded, she’ll need help. And he can help her; the furnace in his chest is burning hot and blows that would have staggered him yesterday are bouncing off him like hail. He’s fighting hard and fast and they all know he’s the vampire who ripped his sire’s head off, so one or two at the edges are thinking better of engaging. He’s interested to see Phasma’s white-blonde head flash as she turns and flees with her protege. But let them go; Poe can take his chances with them. He has to get to Snoke.

“Get — back — here!” Rey bellows as some skinny twit who was sired in the 80s makes a hasty retreat from her blade. But then Snoke is there, staring at her with his cold reptilian eyes and reaching for her with his cold claw, and he can’t let that happen.

Somebody he has no time for is grabbing for him; he jerks their arm down and steps on their shoulder and leaps down beside Rey as she ducks Snoke’s arm and slices out for his stomach, bending back and out of his way as she misses and he reaches for her again. 

Snoke takes a step out of the way of Rey’s sword and he takes his chance, lunging for him with the stake, but something drags him backwards. Hux. Fucking Hux. He smashes his elbow into that smug rodent face, but Hux doesn’t let him go.

“You let him feed from you, did you?” Snoke growls. “Trusted to his Watcher’s oath to triumph over his nature?”

Rey shrugs, circling, sword at the ready. “I mean, I’m not dead, so.”

“Yet,” Snoke corrects. “You’re not dead _yet.”_

Hux is trying to get the stake from him. With his Slayer’s blood in him, he’s easily strong enough that he could tear away, but if he does, he’ll lose the point on his stake. He can’t kill Snoke with a blunt stick. Hux drags, and he follows, prying Hux’s skinny fingers free one by one.

“You think I’m scared of death?” Rey scoffs. “I joke about it on Twitter twice a week.”

“The empty bravado of mortals,” Snoke sighs. “You will be killed. It is foretold. He will drink from you, and you will die, and the terrible mouth will open.”

“He has a soul, and he can read better than you can. It’s your death in the prophecy, not mine.” Slowly but surely, Rey is driving Snoke into a corner. He’ll be vicious when he’s cornered. Hux is only hanging on by one finger, snarling at him like an animal as they struggle. He twists the stake away, turning viciously to throw Hux off balance, and the bastard flies facedown to the floor.

“My death, is it?” asks Snoke. “Then what is the mouth that will open when it comes? Will it consume you, little Slayer? Will it consume him?”

Rey hesitates. He’s already running to her, willing her not to drop her guard, not even for a second, when something flies past him and sticks in Rey’s back.

The needle.

Rey winces, turning. “Fucking hell,” she says. Then her eyes widen, and flutter. “Ben?” she asks, in a high, thin voice, and her knees buckle. The sword falls from her hand.

* * *

“Go!” Finn yells as the door bursts open, and Rose smashes her fist down and shouts a word of power. A cloud of yellow gas floods the tunnel, and the smell of garlic is so strong even Finn’s human lungs find it a bit much to take. The vampire stumbles and falls, and Finn’s stake is waiting to meet its heart. Here comes another. Rey and Kylo must be doing well, if there’re so many running for the exits.

He ducks this one, lets it run past him to meet Poe’s axe. A few more come. He takes easy kills where he finds them, tries not to think too hard. He keeps his eyes on the door.

It doesn’t take too long. He knew it wouldn’t. She always was a bit of a coward.

“Now!” he yells, when he sees her platinum-white hair through the fog of garlic gas. Rose claps twice, and door slams shut behind her. He runs at Phasma. Even when she’s choking on the smell of garlic, he can’t take her down by himself. Poe charges in beside him, and Rose darts close. The instant they have his old sire on the ground, his girlfriend is reciting spells, splashing Phasma with holy water and curses of immobility while Finn fumbles with the knife. Just a minute. All this should need is a minute.

He tears at her bicep, cutting through her clothes and leaning into it until he sees blood. Then he slashes a red line across the heel of his hand, and presses his wound to hers.

She keeps fighting, struggling and cursing. He waits for white light, green light, something. Maybe all he’s done is heal the superficial wound he’s made.

“I don’t think it’s working!” Poe shouts, trying to keep his knee on her shoulder as she snarls.

“Just a minute,” he grits. He takes back his hand and cuts again. This time at his wrist. There’s a spray of blood, and he presses it to the cut in Phasma. “Just one minute.”

* * *

The sword is in his hand before it hits the floor, and Rey is in the crook of his arm. The stroke that takes off Snoke’s head is so hard that the old vampire’s skull hits the floor before it crumbles into dust. He doesn’t see it happen, his eyes fixed on Rey’s as he mutters the strongest wards he knows, the ones his mother taught him, safeguards and healing charms and spells of protection.

 _May the wickedness be held in its tracks,_ he recites. Incantations in Latin, in Bantu, in Hebrew, in Chinese and Greek. _Let the harm go back upon those who would harm. No evil upon her. No evil before her. Drive it out. Keep her safe. Rey. Rey. Rey._

Is Hux there? Are there any members of Snoke’s court who don’t flee? He thinks one of the heads he cuts off has red hair. That’s not what he cares about. That’s not where his eyes are.

_Rey. Rey. Rey._

He runs for the exit; only dust stirs behind him. If he’s strong it’s because he took strength from her. If she’s weak, it’s because she let him drink. Her eyes are closing.

 _“Help!”_ he roars as he carries her down the hall. _“Help!”_

* * *

Phasma makes a horrible noise of pain. Finn’s starting to feel woozy. This was a terrible plan; he’s an idiot; what was he thinking — 

Her eyes fill with green-white light.

“Shit!” Poe cries, jumping back. “Shit, is that it?”

Phasma doesn’t throw Finn off. She twitches and jerks like her body doesn’t belong to her. Her eyes close over the light, and open again, blank and blue. “What have you done?” she cries. But she knows, and he knows too. It’s not happening all in a flash like it did to him, but it’s happening.

“Congratulations, Phasma,” he gasps. “You’re alive.”

Her face twists in a terrible rictus and she reaches for his throat — but she’s only as strong as a very tall woman, and it’s not that hard to avoid her. “What have you done?” she demands again.

He takes back his wrist. The deep cut is knitting itself back together. Slowly. “You turned me into a vampire. I turned you into a human.”

 _“Help!”_ a deep, raw voice is screaming. Someone is pounding on the inside of the door. _“Help; Rey’s hurt!”_

Hurriedly, Rose claps again, and Kylo Ren bursts out. He coughs at the garlic, and his eyes water, but he barely seems to register it on his face. Rey is clutched in his arms. Her eyes are shut.

“Where,” Finn demands, striding forward. He’s lost some blood today. He can lose some more. “Where is she hurt?”

“Magic,” Kylo gasps out. “Rose — do you anything — a spell — ”

“What kind?” Rose asks, digging frantically through her pockets. “What do you need?”

“Phasma,” Kylo shouts, seeing her through the gas, “what was that potion? What have you done?”

“I don’t know,” Phasma sniffs. “I don’t care. Your Slayer can die for all I care.”

Poe puts up a hand to stop Kylo from attacking Finn’s sire. “Are there any survivors we need to worry about?”

“None,” he coughs. “Rey, Rey, look at me, Rey!”

Poe grabs Phasma by the arms and hauls her aside as Kylo pushes through the garlic. “Sorry, lady. If you don’t know anything, we don’t have time for you right now.”

“Fuck you,” Phasma says feebly. “Ingrates. Bastards. How dare you do this to me?”

 _Same way you did,_ Finn thinks. _I just thought I could, and I did._

“Something to bind her soul to her body,” Kylo begs Rose, on the sidewalk. “Something to keep her mind intact. They said it was a leech; something that would take everything from her but her life.”

“I have rice,” Rose says. “Open her mouth; I’ll put a grain inside. _Vong hồn, ở lại! Spiritus, mane!”_

“Spiritus, mane,” Kylo pleads. He lays her gently on the ground. Rose begins to make gestures over Rey’s heart, fishing out a lighter and holding the flame close.

“I don’t know if this is working,” she says, not looking up.

“Should we take her to a hospital?” Poe asks. “Car’s right there.”

Finn has never seen anyone look as bleak and stricken as Kylo Ren does in the light of the street lamp. His hands are shaking. He pulls out a phone, and jabs out a string of ten numbers. “Mom,” he says shakily. “Mom, it’s Ben. Rey’s hurt. I need your help. Please.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> “If we can’t heal her. If her consciousness is permanently gone. You know the Council’s position.”
> 
> He starts to shake again. If the Watcher’s Council thinks there’s no chance to heal her… an incapacitated Slayer is no good in the fight against the powers of darkness. But the death of one Slayer is the call of the next.
> 
> * * *
> 
> The verbs Ben conjugates when Rey asks him to recite something other than his oath are the Latin word for _love_ and the Hebrew word for _guard._ Rose says, "Spirit, stay!" in Vietnamese and Latin. Or so Google and my fading memory of Latin tell me. If I've fucked that up, please don't hesitate to let me know.
> 
> [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/Bombastique1)) remains a bastion of patience and goodwill for putting up with me.


	15. Follow My Lead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> “Aphra?” Leah says cooly into the phone. “Yes, I need a favor.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry I took so long to write 5k words. There was an election. I moved apartments. It's been hard to think.

There’s something painfully familiar about sitting in the back seat of the Falcon while somebody drives it through the city with maximum speed and minimal regard for traffic laws. It’s only an ache at the back of his mind, though; Rey’s in his lap, her eyes shut and her breathing even and absolutely nothing they’ve tried can stir her. Rose has a white-knuckle grip on his phone. “Yes. No, no response to pain or any spell I know. Should I try a possession spell? I’ve never done any shamanic work but if her consciousness has gone – yeah, rice in her mouth – ”

She takes the phone away from her mouth. “Leah says sing to her.”

“Sing?” he says blankly.

“Yeah? Like music? Unless you have a flute on you. Leah says if her spirit isn’t gone – ”

He’ll try anything. Rose is talking to his mother again. He gathers her close to him, puts his mouth to her ear. _I’m just a little lamb lost in the wood,_ he sings brokenly. _I know I could. Be very good. To one. Who’ll watch over me._

* * *

Finn’s glad Poe’s there to drive. His head is spinning. Phasma’s alive. There’s blood all over him and not a scratch on him to show it’s his own. He feels cold, and short of breath. Rey’s hurt, but she’s not hurt. Would his blood do any good, or is it only physical? How much blood has he lost today? How much can he afford to lose? 

He takes a deep breath and shuts his eyes. It’s not exactly easy to meditate with Poe cursing at traffic and Rose talking about spells and the big vampire in the back doing Gershwin on a loop like he’s a sample waiting for the verse to start. But he does his best.

The green thread is still there. It’s very thin. He focuses on it. The steady pulse he remembers is gone, the expansion and contraction. Instead there’s an erratic, weak expansion – a faint flicker of growth, and then a long pause.

 _Come on,_ he urges it mentally. _Come back._ He tries to breathe deep and even.

Poe pulls over in front of the Cathedral. “You can walk faster than I can circle the block.”

Kylo Ren is already climbing out of the car. He carries Rey like she’s the Mona Lisa. Like she’s light and precious and someone might steal her if he lets them see her.

Finn manages about twelve steps before he staggers. Instantly, Rose is under his arm, supporting him. “You’re never doing that again,” she whispers fiercely. “It’s not worth it. She killed you, and you did her a favor.”

Finn decides to save the ethical debate for a time when he doesn’t feel nauseous. “You think Leah has any juice? Maybe some gatorade?”

“If she doesn’t I’ll buy you some,” Rose promises. The worry-furrow in her forehead is deep. Finn tries to carry as much of his own weight as he can.

In the elevator Kylo is still doing the same two bars of the Great American Songbook, which under normal circumstances would have Finn reaching for a stake. But the bastard looks like he’s about to have a nervous breakdown, and Finn is vaguely, uncomfortably aware that he’s heard that song in a dream. He feels like Dorothy in _The Wizard of Oz_ : _And you were there, and you._

Rose rings the bell, and the singing grinds down to a hum, and stops entirely as the door opens. Leah and Kylo stare at each other for a long, silent moment. Leah breathes, looking at them. Kylo swallows hard. He starts to pivot a little towards Finn and Rose. “Can you – can you carry her – ”

“Come in, Ben,” Leah says. There’s another silence, and then her son bows his head and steps over the threshold.

He lays her out on the couch and Rose starts playing “Heart and Soul” on the piano. The instrument is wildly out of tune, but hopefully it doesn’t matter. Kylo – Ben? – is yanking books off the shelves and talking urgently about Vodou and Sambali and psychopomps and shi and Daena. None of which Finn has any opinion about. He’s walking over to offer to try to take music duty from Rose, who presumably knows more, when something on a side-table catches his eye.

It’s a single sheet of paper, with something written out in an alphabet he doesn’t know, and a gloss, and a translation below that, all written in black ink. Someone else has marked it up in red, circling words in the original and scrawling notes between the lines. _No possessive suffixes. Whose mouth?_

He picks it up and hears Rey’s voice in his head. _Does it have to be winter? What if it’s not winter?_

* * *

Ben drops a book when Poe bangs on the door. Leah doesn’t immediately reproach him. She lets Poe in, and he gives Rose a gentle hip-check as she sits at the piano, sitting down by Rey and crooning to her. _Dicen que por las noches, no más se le iba en puro llorar…_ Ben grimaces and slams his fist into the stack of books he’s been gathering; they scatter over the floor, and he looks down at them to hide the tears. That’s when his mother speaks to him sternly, with a gentle grip on his wrist.

“You cannot panic. Your Slayer needs you to keep a level head.”

“Yes,” he swallows. “Yes, I will. I am.”

 _Cómo sufrió por ella,_ Poe sings, _y hasta en su muerte la fue llamando._

“Is there a way to find out if it’s working at all?” Rose asks, coming hesitantly closer. “The rice and the singing? And do you have some juice Finn could have? He’s lost a lot of blood.”

“Cranberry juice in the fridge,” Leah says, waving. “And yes. I was just saying – we need a psychopompic placement spell. If we’ve successfully tethered or detained her spirit, even if it isn’t in her body, we’re not in a hopeless position.”

Implying that there is a hopeless position, and it’s possible that they’re in it. Ben feels himself start to shake. He shoves his hands into his armpits to hide it. His mother is talking, but he turns like a compass needle to Rey. _Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay cantaba,_ Poe is singing, and a familiar darkness fills his eyes. Everything turns over, like a photo negative of itself.

“No,” he says thickly, through the dim air. “No. She’s not gone. She’s here. Keep singing.”

The world is dark, and spinning, but Poe’s voice gets louder. _De pasión mortal moría, que una paloma triste, muy de mañana le va a cantar –_

“She’s here!” he yells again. “Keep singing! She’s not gone; you have to keep her here. Don’t go. Don’t go; come back!”

Then something warm touches his arm. His mother’s hand. The world flips over again and goes still. He wipes his face with the back of his hand. “She’s not gone,” he repeats. He can’t meet Leah’s eyes. The Watchers’ Council, the Order of Ren, Snoke – they all treated the Sight like an asset, but he never learned to take it calmly, like Uncle Luke did. Every time it takes him, he’s still a child with a dream that hurts. He sniffs. “We have to find something. She’s still here.”

“Then we know where to start,” Leah says.

They try for hours. They empty the cupboards, the bookshelves, Rose’s bag; they try everything they have. Daylight comes, and he has to shrink back into the hall until they pull the curtains and make it safe for him again. Poe’s voice gets hoarse, but Leah says recorded music won’t be as powerful; Finn tries singing and he’s not good, but she says he’s good enough. The tuneless snippets he comes up with grate on Ben’s nerves more and more as Poe sips Tension Tamer tea with honey and they go on failing and failing.

_There’s nothing you can’t do, now you’re in New York. These streets will make you feel brand new, big lights will inspire you, now you’re in New York, New York, New York._

Rose passes the box of spices under Rey’s nose. _Kum tzurik,_ Leah says to Rey’s ghost, but Rey’s eyes stay closed. Leah lights a fire in the sink, just like she used to get mad at Dad for doing, and Ben tries to order Rey’s spirit, _Rachel Jacobs, fill ar ais!_ But she doesn’t move. _Tirumpu,_ Rose pleads, as Ben’s trembling fingers wet Rey’s lips with coconut water. And her breath is steady but she doesn’t move, and Ben can’t stand it; he picks her up like a doll and shakes her, but all she does is loll limp in his hands, and there are four pairs of hands on him, weak little human hands. He turns, snarling, to see their frightened and determined faces. Finn is still singing, his eyes fixed on the unconscious Slayer.

_Sasage yo! Sasage yo! Shinzou wo sasage yo!_

He puts her back down on the couch and lets his mother pull him away, down the hall. He can see the bed he used to sleep in over her shoulder. Finn sits back down beside Rey. _Sasage yo! Sasage yo! Shinzou wo sasage yo! Susumu beki mirai wo, sono te de kirikirake!_

“If we can’t heal her. If her consciousness is permanently gone. You know the Council’s position.”

He starts to shake again. If the Watcher’s Council thinks there’s no chance to heal her… an incapacitated Slayer is no good in the fight against the powers of darkness. But the death of one Slayer is the call of the next.

“No.”

“It’s been done before.”

“No. They’ll have to kill me first.”

“Where will Rey be when you’re dead? I’ve tried all the clean magic I know.”

“Then try dirty.”

His mother looks at him steadily. “I will. But Ben. That kind of magic always comes with a price, and I need you to know. There are some I won’t pay.”

“I will,” he says through his teeth.

“There are some I won’t let you pay.”

“I don’t care.”

She looks at him steadily, but he won’t look away. Let her try. Let any of them try.

“I asked Ben into my apartment,” she says. “And you came. I know my son is dead. But does dead always mean gone, Kylo Ren?”

And he swallows hard, because he’s done all kinds of things Ben Szolo never would. With and without his soul. But Rey called him Ben, and he answered. His mother asked Ben in – and doesn’t he think she’s his mother? He tries to cut off his memory, but it clings. His mother; she’s his mother. In the next room, the lucky one who got to come back is singing to Rey, who is gone but not dead, and somewhere in Brooklyn, Phasma’s heart is beating.

“No,” he says. “I’m dead, but I’m not gone.”

She takes a deep breath, and turns away from him. He remembers his father’s voice, at night, snarling, _Don’t turn away from me Leah! Don’t pretend you’re not a human being like the rest of us!_ and her shouting back, _Why do you need to see me cry?_

“I hope that’s enough,” she says, and her voice is thin.

“I’m sorry,” he says, helplessly. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

For a moment she curls in on herself, like she’s wounded, but before he knows whether to reach for her, she’s stiffening her spine and lifting her head. She takes her phone from her pocket and unlocks it, striding back into the curtain-darkened room where Rose is the one singing now.

_Hold up, they don't love you like I love you. Slow down, they don't love you like I love you._

“Aphra?” Leah says cooly into the phone. “Yes, I need a favor.”

* * *

“I knew that thing on her table was cursed,” Rose says, as Poe whisper-croons Cardi B to Rey and mercifully spares Finn from having to sing again. (He knows he’s not good. And if he didn’t know, the looks on their faces would tell him.) “I just didn’t know she knew it was cursed. If she knew it was cursed, why was she using it as a paperweight? I’m gonna put a protective ward on Rey, just in case.”

The door buzzes. “Couldn’t hurt,” Leah says, and opens the door to Asian woman who’s only just a little taller than she is, and seems to be around the same age. “Thanks for coming, Aphra.”

“No problem,” the other woman says breezily. She pulls a covered granny cart into the apartment after her; it rattles and clanks in weird ways. “Don’t bother with the ward, Rose; I use cursed objects as paperweights because I’m very good with cursed objects.”

“That door is soundproofed,” Leah says, frowning. 

“I’m also very good with doors. That’s how I got so many cursed objects. You must be Rose’s boyfriend? I’m Dr. Aphra. Rose and Rey walk my dogs for me; she’s mentioned you.” Her appraising look takes in the blood all over his clothes. “But let’s take a look at Rey. Can we get some better light in here? And you say you’re _sure_ her soul isn’t gone?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” Kylo says. “Don’t open the curtains.”

“Oh,” Dr. Aphra says. “Right. Well.” She gestures irritably at Poe. “You can stop singing; I have a raven stone.”

“Like hell,” Kylo growls. “You’ll fucking burn her.”

“She’s a Slayer; she’ll recover. And that’s no way to talk to your Auntie Chelli.” She drops a black stone on Rey’s chest; it makes an alarming sizzling sound and Kylo slaps it away.

“I have never called you that. Not once in my life. Mom said I was safer playing on the Henry Hudson Parkway than with you.”

“She was probably right. But a raven stone is more secure than singing, and she’s not feeling pain. If we get her spirit back, it won’t burn her anymore, and her skin will heal quickly.” She puts the stone back on Rey’s chest. “You can stop singing. The stone will tether her.”

“Thanks,” Poe sighs faintly.

“But what can we do to bring her back?” Rose asks.

“Well, you have some options.” Dr. Aphra digs in the cart and pulls out a chain with a huge, gaudy pendant. “This is the Gem of Tahn. It imparts undeath.”

“No,” Leah says. “We have no idea how a Slayer will react to that magic.”

“Fair enough. I have a Mori sphere.”

“That will bring her back?” Kylo Ren asks.

“Yes. She will kill everything she touches, though.”

“Does that include vampires?” he asks.

“Unfortunately for the Slayer, no. Every living thing she touches, I should have said.”

“No,” Leah says. “It would impede her in her duties and in New York City? She’d kill six people just getting across town.” Kylo doesn’t look like he objects _that_ much and Leah gives him a look. “Do you think Rey would appreciate that?”

“Fine. What are the other options?”

“I brought a Tareaux chain.”

“Too permanent,” Leah says.

“I have a full set of Akanthean spikes.”

 _“Absolutely not,”_ Kylo roars.

“Fine. Well, that’s all the solutions I’ve got. Except for one.”

“Yes?” Leah snaps. “This isn’t a stage show, Aphra.”

“She’s always been like this, if you were wondering,” Dr. Aphra tells Finn confidingly. Her hands are drawing something that looks like a long strip of black linen from the depths of her cart. “This is a Veil of Alcestis. Are you familiar?”

“I am,” Leah says with a frown. “But she’s not dead.”

“So the bargain is different.”

“What’s the bargain?” Kylo demands.

“Her spirit is recalled. In exchange for thirteen years of pain.”

“Pain for her?”

Dr. Aphra gives Kylo a bright, knowing smile. “For anybody who’s up for it, Benny-boy.”

“Done,” he says instantly. Leah starts to say something, but Dr. Aphra interrupts, pulling the veil behind her back.

“Ah ah ah. You pay for dirty magic with pain. But somebody’s got to pay for valuable historical artifacts with hard currency. I favor Euros, but dollars will do. Current exchange rate… it comes to about sixty thousand.”

“You can’t sell a yard of linen at Sotheby’s,” Leah says coldly, “and the black market doesn’t like Veils of Alcestis, because the black market doesn’t like resurrection bargains that require informed consent.”

“Do you really want to haggle with me over your Slayer’s life, Organa?”

“Pay it,” Kylo says hoarsely.

Leah’s lips are white. “I can’t. Han drained our savings when he went – he went to California, but he didn’t have the power for the – spell he wanted, and he paid a warlock for a power transfusion. So that he could – ”

Kylo is crying, his face all twisted. He turns away from his mother, his head down, and looks at Rey, and then back at Dr. Aphra.

“Look out!” Finn shouts, but before the words are out of his mouth Kylo’s on her, fangs bared. But he doesn’t bite; he stops, snarling, and Dr. Aphra gives him a chilly smile, and presses the stake a little harder into his chest.

“Benny, if you _had_ spent some time with me as a kid, you’d know I’m not stupid.”

“Dr. Aphra is our guest,” Leah says, in a tone Finn strongly associates with being sent to his room with television privileges revoked for the month. Kylo does not say, as Finn would have after a reprimand like that, _sorry, ma’am,_ but he backs off, head down and human face back on.

“Sixty- _one_ thousand,” Dr. Aphra says.

Finn knows it’s not easy for vampires to get paler, but Kylo seems to be managing. He kneels on the floor again beside Rey. Leah’s hand is tight on the back of the couch where her Slayer lies. 

“It’s possible,” she says slowly, “that the Watchers’ Council might agree to transfer the funds to you.”

Kylo’s head whips up. “Yes. The Council. They have to pay.”

Leah says warningly, “You know the Council – Travers may not – ”

“They will.” He’s on his feet, stabbing the air with his finger, and stalking down the carpet. “They will; Quentin Travers will; they’ll pay. Because she’s not gone; she can be helped. They swore the same oath I did, and if they don’t save her, they’ve broken it as much as I did. And if they don’t save her, I won’t let them cover it up. I will go to every surviving member of the Independent Council and tell them that the Council in London put _funding_ before the Slayer’s life. If they don’t save my Slayer I’ll bring back the schism; I’ll tear apart the Council they spent a century knitting back together. And it won’t just be the Independent Watchers who go. You know it won’t. No Watcher who has ever had or ever hoped to have a Slayer will stand behind them if they _stand by and let her die.”_

“You’d blackmail the Council?”

He looks at Rey, and his voice sounds dazed and broken. “I put my learning in her service,” he says. “All my learning in her service.”

Leah bites her lip, just a little, and if Finn had to name the look she’s giving Kylo Ren, he might call it pride.

(Because he’s her son, isn’t he? She can say what she wants about how the vampire is just a demon who looks like her son, but she knows. Finn can tell she knows.)

“I’ll call Travers. Ben, may I talk to you for a moment?”

They walk into the hall again. Finn doesn’t have to sing anymore, but in the awkward social silence of the moment his brain cycles the _Attack on Titan_ opening song through again. _Offer up, offer up your hearts! Clear a path to the future with your own hands!_

He picks up the paper with the translation on it again. Something about it just… bothers him. He hums, because now the song is stuck in his head. _Shinzou wo sasayego..._ Why should it bother him? He doesn’t know this language; he doesn’t even know this alphabet. He crumples the paper in his fist. It must just be that it’s talking about blood when he’s lost all this blood, but – 

“Hey, lady, put that back,” Poe says sharply. “Trust me, you don’t want it.”

Finn looks over. Dr. Aphra is rolling her eyes. “What,” she asks, “just because of the unbearable pain or yada yada yada?”

“Forgive me if I don’t think you should be able to walk off with implements of torture just because you feel like it.”

“If you say so, boy scout.” She takes a plain-looking box out of her cart, and slides it back on the shelf. “Good work spotting that, though. I know some museums that wish their guards were that good.”

“You steal from museums?” Poe says with disgust.

“I have heard of incidents in which museums which have had thefts,” Dr. Aphra says blandly. “Or, depending on your opinions about colonialism, plunder, and loot, you could think of them as liberations. Or at least redistributions. Context is everything.”

With the box back in its old place on the shelf, Finn can place what it is – the box where Leah stored Anaquin’s blade. “I guess a lot of people would pay a lot of money for something that can hurt people that badly,” he says, bleakly.

“Well, sure. But it has other points of interest, you know.” She drifts back towards it just a little, like she can’t help it. She really does look interested.

“What, like historical interest?” Leah said it was old. Like, medieval old.

“Well, that too. Everybody loves a sordid story, you know? Tempestuous Spanish nobleman, forbidden love, secret pregnancy, suicide, curse, descent into madness – I’m kind of shocked there isn’t an opera, honestly.” She runs a finger over the box. “But I mean _technically.”_

“It’s cursed and it hurts a lot,” Rose says. “I don’t really see the technical interest.”

“Well, yeah, the curse. You’re right: nasty and pretty basic. Our man Anaquin was upset, so we’ll give him a pass for the brute force approach. But I mean the original making. Before it was cursed.”

“It had power before it was cursed?” Rose asks. “Leah said it was a… mercy-killing knife.”

“A misericorde, yeah. Don Anaquin was a knight, but he was in tight with all the big wizards of the day, and they were always out to get each other. The knife is made to steal and store an enemy’s power.”

“Pain,” Poe says frowning. “Wesley Wyndam-Pryce told me it stored pain.”

“Well, that’s what makes it interesting, isn’t it? On the one hand, you’ve got a basic but _beautifully_ -crafted absorption and discharge spell mechanism incorporated into the forging of the blade. On the other, you’ve got a crude but really extraordinarily powerful curse of unspeakable suffering. Reinforced by the blood of a mortal blow.” 

“Shit,” Rose says. “So do the functions unite? Or are they still separate spell matrices? Is there an interference pattern between the two magics?”

“Couldn’t tell you without investigating further.” Dr. Aphra laces her fingers together. “Totally fascinating interaction, though, isn’t it?”

“Cool story,” Poe says. “Don’t touch.”

Finn feels woozy. The paper’s still clutched in his fist. Impulsively, he folds it so that the gloss and the translation are hidden and only the original shows. “Dr. Aphra,” he says, “can you read this?”

She takes it from him. “Ooh, Canaanite – no. Phoenician? Phoenicio-Punic? Hmm. Well, it doesn’t say ‘don’t touch’ or ‘cursed’ or ‘forbidden,’ which are the main words I tend to look out for.”

“So you can ignore them?” Poe asks.

“So I can ignore them carefully. But let’s see.” She peers at the paper. “‘Something third-person-will fall, and he will kill two something-something third-person-will know and something-something third person-will take blood and life and a new and terrible wound will open.’” She hands the paper back. “Sounds gross!”

Finn unfolds the paper and stares down at the translation written on it. _The Watcher will fall, and he will kill two fathers. The Slayer will know him, and he will bring her down. He will take blood and life, and a new and terrible mouth will open._

He sways on his feet a little. “Fuck!” Rose cries. “Finn, sit down. I’ll get you more juice.”

* * *

“You were very quick to volunteer for thirteen years of pain,” Leah says uneasily. “You’re not trying to do this to do some kind of… penance, are you?”

“No.”

“Your father always worried that raising you this close to a Catholic church – ”

 _“No,_ Mom. She’s my Slayer. I have to take care of her.”

She looks him in the eye. “You have some experience of pain.” Just the word, _pain,_ brings back memories he refuses to look at. His gut twists and his scar burns.

“Yeah. But I was human, then. And there’s a difference between whatever the Veil of Alcestis will cause and… that.” Without thinking, he puts his fingers to where the scar ends, on his chest, and watches her eyes follow his hand. She flinches.

“It doesn’t – Rey said your scar went under your collar. She didn’t say how far down it went.”

“Yeah,” he says, because what else can he say? It happened. It hurt. It was too much for him. And this isn’t penance, because he doesn’t believe pain is a currency that can redeem his sins, but it could be something like a second chance, couldn’t it? He failed Tai, but he won’t fail Rey.

His mother’s eyes are closed. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“When you were born I thought I’d never let anyone hurt you.”

“Mom,” he says, thickly. She’s so small, and her hair is so grey, and her hands are so thin. “Mom, I wasn’t a kid.” 

Her eyes open. “Let me do this, Ben.” 

“What?”

“I’m sixty-five. I already ache all the time; what’s a little more? I know she was assigned to you, but she’s my Slayer too.”

So small and so grey and so thin and so, so steely. “No. Don’t be stupid, Mom.” She hurts all the time. And he murdered her husband. And she wants to keep him safe. “I have to do this.”

She breathes deeply, not taking her eyes off him. “Are you doing this because of the curse? As insurance, so that any… happiness you may happen to feel is diminished?”

“No. I mean, I’m sure it’ll hurt and everything, but – you don’t have to worry about that, either way.”

“Oh? Because I’m not blind, Ben. I can see what’s going on between you and Rey.”

If he could blush, he would. Great. “Don’t worry. I talked to Angel. He said it’s – it’s not the physical – experience. It’s emotional. He was happy because he felt trusted. Because he felt like he had hope of making up for what he’d done. Because he felt.” He swallows. “Loved. And she does trust me, and we have – but she doesn’t – and I know I can’t ever make up for what I’ve done, Mom. Angel said he thought that if Buffy could trust him and love him, that there was hope for him. To clean the slate.”

You can’t ever clean the slate. All you can do is write more.

He looks up again, and meets her eyes. “I know better,” he says. “Pain or not. It’s not happening. I just need to do this for Rey.”

She takes his hand. “Okay, Benny. Okay.” For a very quick moment, she touches his fucked-up cheek, and he thinks her eyes look wet. “You go get Aphra to explain the ritual, and let me put the fear of God into Quentin Travers and the Council.”

He goes over the ritual three times with Aphra, because he is going to do this no matter what, but he was raised to kick the tires, especially when it comes to magic. By the time Leah comes back out, and gives Aphra a nod that makes her grin, he knows the spell and the structure and the underlying principle, and he has a vague, ugly premonition of how much this is going to hurt.

Thirteen years is a long, long time.

He looks at Rey, lying still with the raven stone burning her as it holds down her spirit. Her stubborn mouth is slack and her closed eyes are stiller than sleep, and however much the veil hurts him, it won’t hurt as much as this.

“Let’s go,” he says, and kneels down beside her.

He wraps her hand in his and offers them both up to Aphra, who wraps the black veil around them both. “Do you know what you are asking?” she asks him, formally.

“I ask for her return.”

“And do you know what you are offering?” Aphra’s dark eyes are serious. He tried to bite her throat out half an hour ago, but it feels like she’s offering him an out. Giving him a chance to walk away.

The veil is tight around their hands, but inside it, he squeezes Rey’s fingers. Limp and small and warm in his. “I offer a wound, with no healing or comfort, for thirteen mortal years.”

“And how do you offer it?”

He looks at Rey’s face. “Freely,” he says. “I offer it of my own choice and by my own free will.”

Aphra looks at Finn and Rose, Poe and his mother, all standing silent. “I’m going to remove the raven stone,” she says. “So you might need music again.”

Leah slides onto the piano bench. It’s out of tune; he can’t remember a time when it wasn’t. But he can still tell what the melody is, the string of rising notes, even before she sings softly in a smoky-sweet voice. _Won’t you tell him please to put on some speed._

“The offer is made,” Aphra says, and picks up the stone. “Rachel Jacobs, return.”

_Follow my lead. Oh, how I need._

“Rey,” he says. “Come back.”

_Someone to watch over me._

Rey’s eyes open, and he hurts. 

“Ben,” she says.

He hurts so much. But it’s okay. She came back. He smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may already know ["Someone to Watch Over Me,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6n-3ZvtnjU) ["Empire State of Mind,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsZlY0Vz4-o) and ["Hold Up."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeonBmeFR8o) The song Poe sings is "Cucurrucucú Paloma," a song about someone who dies for love and whose soul lingers on earth as a dove. You can hear Oscar Isaac himself sing it [here.](https://hupperts.tumblr.com/post/136235669452/oscar-isaac-sings-caetano-velosos-rendition-of) Finn sings the [extremely catchy opening](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKP-vZvjbh8) to Season 2 of _Attack on Titan._
> 
> Leah, Ben, and Rose ask Rey's spirit to return in Yiddish, Irish, and Tamil. This chapter originally posted with an error in the Yiddish which has since been corrected; my apologies!
> 
> Alcestis is a figure from Greek myth who volunteers to die in her husband's place.
> 
> [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/Bombastique1)) was kind enough to read this chapter and advise me on Dr. Aphra, since I'm far from well-read in the comics.


	16. Being Alive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> Rey thinks she couldn’t sleep if she wanted to. 
> 
> _Thirteen years?_
> 
> She walks to the kitchen and opens the drug store wine bottle she keeps stashed in the back of the cabinet and which Finn is always telling her she should use as a drain cleaner before a drink. 
> 
> Thirteen years. And he doesn’t even love her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, this took me forever, and yes, I increased the chapter count, and yes, I do apologize. Please also note an updated tag for chronic pain.

For a second she thinks he’s going to kiss her, or that he has kissed her, like Sleeping Beauty. Because she’s been… asleep? Drugged, no, drugged; she remembers a bite too thin and sharp to be a fang, and the feeling of draining out of her own body as she called his name. And it doesn’t surprise her, that he would be the one who fixed it. Who saved her.

His smile draws his face into a dozen soft creases, rumpled and sweet like the whipped cream on cocoa.

She _wants_ to kiss him. She puts her hand out, reaching – and then his face crumples into a grimace, and Leah steps between them, facing Ben.

“Rey?” Finn asks, behind her. She’s not in a basement in Brooklyn an hour after sunset; she’s in Leah’s UWS apartment, and there’s sunlight around the edges of the curtains, and... Dr. Aphra getting to her feet beside her?

“Am I late to walk the doggos?” she asks, because she doesn’t know why else Dr. Aphra’d be giving her such a smug look.

“Aphra, do not even _consider_ asking for a discount,” Leah says sharply. Her thin small hand is on Ben’s head. “Rey, you’re excused from dog-walking duty today.”

“Am I supposed to walk them _myself?”_ Dr. Aphra asks incredulously. “Those idiots start climbing under car wheels the minute I get them out the door.”

“Take them into Morningside,” Rey says, on autopilot. “No cars. Not too many bikes.” She’s trying to get a look at Ben, who’s sitting very still, with his hands clenched over his knees.

“Morningside,” Dr. Aphra repeats. She seems to be trying to look at Ben too. “How you doing there, Benny boy?”

“Fine, thank you,” Ben says in a flat voice.

“What happened?” Rey demands. Everyone seems present, and alive, which is good, but there’s an uneasy feeling in the room, and she doesn’t understand why she’s only awake now, or why Dr. Aphra’s here. “Is Snoke dead? What did they get me with?”

“They had a magicked drug,” Rose says anxiously. “They used it to banish your spirit from your body, and we tried everything, but – ”

“Dr. Aphra brought you back,” Ben says, interrupting, in that same flat, tense voice. “She found an artifact that brought back your spirit. Don’t worry. The Watchers’ Council paid for it. Everything’s taken care of.”

“Oh,” Rey says. “That’s good, I guess, because I don’t think my state health exchange plan covers bad vampire bath salts.” She says it lightly, and remembers Kylo Ren’s voice – Ben’s voice – in the subway tunnel. _They OD’d six months after they handed you over to CPS._ She doesn’t even know which drug. She doesn’t want to know. She wants a drink, and she feels nauseous, and she wants Ben to – to what, hold her hand? He’s not her emotional support vampire. (Not her boyfriend. She was stupid even to think.) She asks again, “Snoke’s dead? The prophecy – ”

There’s a thump, and Rose screams Finn’s name.

“Shit,” Poe swears, running around the couch. “Shit shit shit. Blood loss.”

“He was hurt?” Leia asks, twisting away from Ben. She keeps her hand on his head, and he turns his face away, so Rey still can’t see it. It’s like he’s hiding. But what’s happened to Finn? She scrambles up; Rose is kneeling beside him on the floor.

“He fainted? From blood loss?” she asks. “But I thought his blood was – ”

 _“We should take him home,”_ Rose says loudly. “We should take him home right now. Rey, can you help me carry him to the car?”

Rey casts a bewildered look at Leah. Leah’s not looking at her. And she can definitely carry Finn a lot more easily than Rose can, or even Rose and Poe together. “Sure,” she says, and vaults over the couch to pick him up. As she does it, she feels a twinge in her neck.

Ben’s bite.

She lifts Finn gently. “Come on,” Rose says anxiously, and Poe’s already gone to bring the car around. “We’ll tell you everything on the way home.”

Ben says something that sounds like _no, don’t,_ but it’s too mumbled; she can’t be sure. But he doesn’t get up, and Rose is pulling her down the hall.

* * *

Finn comes to to the deeply unnerving sensation of being carried like a baby. Sometimes he wakes up and forgets he’s alive again. Sometimes he wakes up and it seems like it was just a bad dream that he was ever dead. But he’s never woken up and wondered if his whole adulthood was a fake-out.

“What the fuck?” he says, and Rey almost drops him.

“Shit! Sorry. You fainted. We’re taking you home.”

“Sorry to have Rey drag you out like a sack of potatoes,” Rose says, “but I was afraid somebody was going to mention your powers to Dr. Aphra and she’d sell you to a scary medical tech company for a million dollars.”

Okay, that’s… valid. “I think I can stand now, thanks.”

He’s recovering his adult-man dignity when Poe pulls up. He takes shotgun, and Rose and Rey settle in the back, while Rose fills Rey in on what’s been happening since she got stuck in a supernatural k-hole. At first Rey seems hype, hissing _yes!_ every time Rose describes something going to plan. After Rose starts talking about Kylo singing to her, though, she goes quiet. When Rose says _sixty-one thousand dollars,_ he hears Rey suck in her breath. Then Rose says _thirteen years,_ and there’s a long pause but Finn doesn’t hear her say anything at all.

He doesn’t turn around to look. He knows what it feels like, to know that somebody gave up more for you than you ever would have asked for.

* * *

Leah writes Aphra a check. “Wait two days to cash it,” she says, in the same tone she used to use to tell Ben not to touch latkes straight out of the oil. “The Council has sent me the funds, but the wire transfer from the U.K. isn’t immediate.”

“Thank God you warned me, Organa. I never would have thought that there might be a delay involved in international banking.” She pockets the check lightly. “You know your Slayer looks really thin. You should feed her up.”

“I commend your compassion,” Leah says drily, opening the door.

“I don’t want to be eaten by vampires, and she’s the main population control factor. Speaking of – bye, Benny-boy.” Her mouth drops its smirk, just for a moment. Ben hasn’t moved from his spot on the floor by the couch, and she gives him a steady look. “Good luck. Maybe aspirin?”

She closes the door behind her, and Ben hears the wheels of her cart roll away towards the elevator. He focuses on the sound of the wheels, then back on his own body.

The strangest part is the way it doesn’t match. It feels like he’s been stabbed, like someone put the stake in him a few inches too far to the right. But also he can feel his real flesh, strong and uninterrupted, right where his brain is telling him there’s a wound.

He gets to his feet. It isn’t so bad. If he were hurt like this in a fight, he’d certainly keep fighting. But there isn’t any fight, and so his mind comes back to the pain, focuses on the pain.

“Ben?” his mother asks. Her face is pulled tight in a worried frown. “Would you like to try aspirin?”

It’s not going to help. There’s no inflammation to suppress, no chemical message to his brain that can be interrupted. The pain is already there.

“Sure,” he says, because she looks so worried.

He takes the pills dry; if they’re bitter on his tongue, he doesn’t notice.

The first moment had hurt the worst, but he’d had Rey there then. He replays the moment, her eyes blinking open and the flood of relief as they focused on him. Then his mother standing in front of him with her hands on his head, just like when he was little and he’d cry into her stomach, pretending no one could see him crying.

But Rey is gone and he’s not a child.

“It’s not as bad as – ” She gestures helplessly at his face. “Is it?”

He laughs. That hurts, like there’s a real cut in him to be pulled on by the shaking of his chest, and he stops. “No. Not nearly.” She relaxes a little, and he adds, “It would probably be worse if I were human. As it is – could be worse.”

But when he lifts his hand to touch the wound that isn’t there, he realizes it coincides with the end of his scar. It’s parallel with his heart, so maybe it is just a coincidence. But it feels strangely like something picking up where it left off.

“Rey’s gone home?” he asks.

“Yes. It’s nearly noon, Ben. Do you want to sleep?”

Can he, with this in his chest? But he is so tired. He nods, and thinks about Rey’s eyes, bright and sweet, and doesn’t even notice that he’s walking to his old bed until he’s curling up his legs to fit. By then he’s already halfway sunk in sleep, and his last thought before it covers him completely is Rey’s hand, reaching out for him.

* * *

Finn and Rose are exhausted, and Rey offers Poe the couch, but he widens his bloodshot, dark-circled eyes at her and swears he’s fine to drive back to the Bronx. Rey hears the double groan as her roommates fall onto their bed.

Rey thinks she couldn’t sleep if she wanted to.

_Thirteen years?_

She walks to the kitchen and opens the drug store wine bottle she keeps stashed in the back of the cabinet and which Finn is always telling her she should use as a drain cleaner before a drink.

Thirteen years. And he doesn’t even love her.

She wasn’t going to think about this, like she doesn’t think about her parents, but it’s all spilling out before she even has the bottle open. If he loved her he’d have lost his soul, fucking her in his bed, or on the wet grass in the park. She pours herself a water glass full of shitty rosé.

 _If I wasn’t a Watcher I was nothing,_ he said. That’s how much he cares about it. And his mother was a Watcher, and so were his grandparents or whatever. _It’s been the honor of my life to be your Watcher._ That’s how much it means to him. She drains half the glass.

So what can she do?

Be better at fighting, she decides. Be a better Slayer, the best. Make him proud. Make it worth it. He’ll hurt for thirteen years and then it’ll be over and when it’s over she’ll still be there, fighting.

She knows how to wait. How to work while she waits. How to lower her expectations into something nebulous and warm, just _something better than how it is now._

And it’s not like her parents. She really can make him proud of her.

Her phone buzzes, and she fumbles it out of her pocket. It’s not a text, just a message from her main task app, reminding her that she hasn’t signed up for any jobs in over 36 hours.

Right. She still owes Finn and Rose. But she should train, so Ben’s not sorry he did this for a no-account Slayer. She finishes the glass and pours some more.

The bite on her shoulder throbs. She pulls down her collar and looks at it with her phone camera. Most of her wounds heal cleanly, like they’d never happened. Not this one. Four scars, from the top and bottom fangs. Messy, uneven scars, and she remembers him shifting her in his arms, biting harder as he fucked her harder. A queasy little thrill goes through her as she remembers the sounds he made –

_Really got in deep, didn’t you, Ben?_

Someone bangs on the apartment door.

* * *

It doesn’t hurt when he sleeps.

Not where it hurts when he’s awake, anyway. He dreams he’s back at the Academy, and Tai is waiting for him as he comes out of the Headmaster’s office.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Tai says, quiet and reproachful. Ben doesn’t answer. He doesn’t want to talk to Tai. He doesn’t want to talk to anybody. He wants to break every window in the place, and most of the noses. He means to walk right past him, because that’s what Tai wants, isn’t it? But Tai grabs his hand, and Ben stops.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Tai says again. “It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anything to do with him.”

Which is true. Hennix isn’t the one who made him feel this way. He just happened to ask where Tai was, in a tone which could plausibly be interpreted as snide, which Ben felt was a plausible excuse to punch him in the face. Now Ben’s knuckles are bruising, and he has disciplinary cleaning duty, and Tai still doesn’t love him, so no, he didn’t have to do it and he probably shouldn’t have.

“What do you care?”

“I’m sorry,” Tai says, desperately. He’s still holding Ben’s hand, and Ben knows he’d drop it if anybody came, but right now he’s holding on, and Ben hates how much he loves it, how much he wants to have Tai’s hands on any part of him at all.

“I don’t care if you’re sorry,” he says, as coldly as he can. Which isn’t very, since his eyes are getting wet and his nose is getting stuffy. Tai’s hand is warm.

“I didn’t want to hurt you. Not everything has to have a _name,_ Ben,” Tai says, like that’s supposed to mean something. But he squeezes Ben’s hand, and Ben can’t help it; he squeezes back.

Then the door opens, behind them, and they’re not holding hands anymore. Tai is pale, and his voice is distant. “And it’s not good for Watchers to have too many attachments, anyway.”

This is all memory, memories he could conjure up in his waking hours. If he ever wanted to. He could remember it, and he could remember how Tai climbed into his bed that night again, and Ben let him. How they never talked about it again, because no matter how many times Ben opened his mouth because he could _swear_ Tai was looking at him just exactly the way he was looking at Tai, he always shut it again. Because Tai didn’t want to hurt him.

He remembers all that. He doesn’t remember the man who comes through the open door in his dream, smiling a sad, ironic smile.

Suddenly Ben’s older, and he’s walking on sand. Not the beach this time. Nothing but sand, as far as his eyes can see. Dry, yellow sand that he sinks down into; it fills his shoes before he’s taken three steps.

“May as well take them off,” says the man he doesn’t remember.

“Won’t it burn me?” Ben asks.

“I rather think the sun ought to burn you, by rights,” the man says mildly. He’s old, and British, and Ben struggles to place him. The Academy? Oxford? He seems so familiar. “Burn you quite to cinders. If the sun doesn’t, I don’t see why the sand should.”

Ben takes off his shoes and carries them in his hands. The other man looks down at them. He’s not at tall as Ben; his hair is thin, and white, like his beard. “I’m supposed to tell you to leave those behind, I think. But Watchers are always being told to leave things behind. Easier said than done.”

“You’re a Watcher?”

“Oh yes. An active one, too, once upon a time.”

“Your Slayer died?” It’s a tactless, stupid question. Rey’s the only living Slayer; every Slayer who came before her died. _Every Watcher fails, because every Slayer dies._

“I loved her,” the man says, simply. “We all do. They pretend at the Academy that they can teach us not to. All they teach us is to lie. To other people, and sometimes to ourselves.”

Ben stops. The man smiles again.

“Sometimes prophecies are like winter. Sometimes they’re shell games. But sometimes, after all, they’re hope.”

“Angel told me he lost his soul because Buffy gave him hope. Hope and love and trust.” Sand is starting to whip at Ben’s ankles; a wind is rising.

“Ah, but Angel was ignorant. He didn’t know he could lose his soul. He had no fear, to balance his hope, or her love and trust.” The man’s gray-blue eyes are calm. “The balance is rather important, you’ll find.”

“I’m supposed to be afraid, too? On top of everything else?” The wind is hot, and hard; sand is rising in sheets to wrap around them.

“I know you’ve been given quite a lot of things to carry, haven’t you? My name not least among them. But every traveler with a heavy pack knows: balance is everything.”

The hot wind howls, and Ben has to throw his arm over his eyes to protect them from the lacerating sand. When the storm drops, and Ben drops his arm, the man they named him after is gone, and another man is standing there beside him. It’s the lucky one. Finn. Ben shuts his eyes and tries not to hate him.

“I got cursed,” he says, “and you got cured.”

Finn looks away. “Nothing gets dealt out evenly, does it?”

“No.” They can agree on that. The sand is thinning out under Ben’s feet. Blades of grass poke at his soles.

“I think we have somewhere to be,” Finn says. They can agree on that, too; Ben can feel it, inside him, an impatience. A call from someone who’s waiting. He nods. They walk together, and around them, everything turns green.

* * *

Rey looks through the peephole. The woman outside looks maybe sort of familiar, but not really. Rey doesn’t smell demon. And also it’s sunny out. She opens the door.

“Slayer,” the woman snarls. “Let me talk to him. I saw him get out of the car with you.”

And Rey _does_ recognize that voice, which talked about a magical leech, something that would drain away everything but her life – she grabs a stake from the basket by the door – and then the woman leans over the threshold and grabs her.

She’s not strong. Not compared to Rey, anyway. Not strong like a vampire would be. Rey twists the wrist that holds her, and the woman cries out. She collapses to the floor in a heap, even though the only part of her Rey can possibly have hurt is her wrist, and not even that badly. She falls to the floor and she cries.

Finn and Rose rush out of their room, sleepy and panicked, and Rose shrieks when she sees the woman on the floor. Finn freezes. He looks more awake than Rose, but also more lost. The woman is moaning something in French. Then she climbs to her feet and lurches towards Finn.

 _“Change me back!”_ she screams. Rose jumps between her and Finn, but the woman doesn’t seem to even notice. “You _have_ to change me back!”

Finn seems almost distracted. “I can’t do that, Phasma.”

“You cannot leave me _like this!”_ She strikes her chest, and then her hand stays, scratching and scratching at the fine silver silk of her shirt. Her eyes are wild.

“He did you a _favor,”_ Rose says. “You killed him, but he hurt himself. He risked himself. To bring you back to life.”

“I don’t want _life,”_ Phasma spits. “I don’t want this. I didn’t ask for it.”

“You didn’t ask before you made me a vampire,” Finn says. “I didn’t ask before I made you a human.”

“Then this is what? Your revenge? Take it back; take it back I don’t want it!”

Rey had completely forgotten about this part of the plan. If she’s honest, she hadn’t paid enough attention in the first place; she was worried about being bitten, about hiding her sword in Ben’s coat, about live-action vampire PSAs. She’d forgotten that Finn was lying in wait for his sire.

The woman is crying again, tears and snot running down her face as she huddles down on the floor again. “I don’t want this,” she sobs. “I can’t be this.”

“You can,” Finn tells her. “You have to be.”

“You did this to me. You have to help me.”

“‘I killed a guy and made him work for me,’” Rose says to the air, with a bad British accent. “‘He saved my life. To me, this is bad.’”

“If you won’t turn me back, take me to someone who will! I don’t care if it’s Kylo Ren; I don’t care if his Slayer cuts off my head the second I rise; I can’t do this. I can’t.”

“You’d rather be a dead vampire than a living human?” Rose demands.

“I can’t be _this!_ Who is _this?_ Some… filthy, wretched…” Phasma’s face twists, disgust and pain. _“Human being.”_

“Rose,” Finn says slowly. “If… you say I’m not the same person I was when I was a vampire, then she can’t be either, right?”

Rose stops. She’s breathing hard. So is Rey. A dozen things are going through her head. _You didn’t say it was fucking curable!_ she’d said to Leah when she’d met Finn. And Leah’d said it wasn’t. Finn was supposed to be a one-off. Is this one a one-off too?

“Phasma,” Finn says carefully, stooping beside her on the floor. “You don’t have to like it. But this is who you have to be now.”

She crosses to the kitchen sink and just drinks from the tap. Cold water runs over her face as she swallows. She imagines Ben standing in sunshine, sitting on a park bench on a Sunday afternoon and drinking coffee while he reads, and the light picking out warm reds in his hair. Ben eating pizza slices and seeing himself in the mirror. Ben warm under her hands, warm against her cheek, warm against her lips and tongue, and warm as he comes inside her. She wants it, so much.

Ben called Finn _the lucky one._ If this woman can be rescued, why can’t Ben?

“I can’t,” Phasma mumbles. “I can’t think. I never thought about it, I just – I just – I _ate_ them.” She screams again in French, but this time Rey can pick out the loudest word. Google Translate not required. _Monstre._

Ben won’t hurt anybody. This woman would have, if Finn hadn’t brought her back to life. She’d have hurt a lot of people. Finn’s saved all of them.

Her head spins. Ben in the sunlight. Her father with the sun over her shoulder, giving her away. Ben’s teeth in her neck. Finn and Ben in a dream, on the shore of a beach, as the ocean pulls her away. Ben leaning back, not kissing her. Finn fainting away from blood loss. The woman struggling to her feet in their apartment, with a hostile, desolate face. Maybe Finn can give Ben his life back. But Ben’s given her thirteen years, and she has nothing of her own to give him except work. No wonder he doesn’t love her.

“If you really want me to, I can take you to Kylo Ren,” Finn says quietly. “I don’t think he’ll tell you anything you want to hear, though.”

“No. No, I don’t want to talk to that lunatic. I don’t want to talk to you. You won’t help me. No one will help me. This is just how I remember it. Being _alive._ You’re all alone, and no one will help.”

Phasma’s footsteps on the stairs are quiet, by human standards. Finn looks after her, troubled, and Rose looks at him, troubled too. Rey bends back down over the sink and throws up, as quietly as she can. Bile and cheap pink wine.

“Rey?” Finn asks. “You okay?”

“Just… that drug must have fucked with my system, I guess.”

Rose comes over and puts a worried hand on her forehead. Finn is looking strange. Rey is afraid to ask, but she does.

“Can you – could you do it again?” Maybe if Ben could be human he would – or maybe he would like her even less. _At least now he thinks I smell good. At least now he wants to eat me._

“I don’t know,” he says, and his forehead furrows. “We didn’t tell Leah about this part, did we?”

* * *

The pain rises in Ben’s chest as he wakes up, like the flame turning up on a gas stove. He keeps his eyes closed. There is someone close, smelling like dumpling soup, old books, and warm blood. He can hear her breathing.

“I’m awake,” he says. He thinks of asking her for a photo album, to see if he can find the old man they named him after, but he already knows.

“Did you know you breathe in your sleep?” she asks him, mildly. “When you’re asleep you look – ”

She breaks off, but Ben knows what she meant. “I’m sorry,” he says wretchedly. He closes his eyes tighter.

There’s a silence. He can’t just lie here. If Rey were here he’d get up. He will get up. He’s tensing his muscles to do it when she speaks again.

“If you _were_ human I would tell that… human bodies are not reliable. The longer you live in one, the more liable they are to hurt. And go on hurting.” He opens his eyes and looks at her. She’s looking at her own hands. Are they gnarled, swollen around the knuckles?

How did he let her become old?

“Human bodies let pain in. Like boats letting on water,” she says, wry and rueful like she always has been. “But most of us keep doing most of the things we’ve always done. Living with pain like it’s an ankle bracelet or a bad roommate. Spending our time, putting our thoughts, with the things that we love.” She looks at him, and she’s open in a brave, hopeful way he feels like he hasn’t seen since he was a child. “I know you’re not a human being. But I think you will find some solace in the human solution.”

“It’s not a solution,” he says, and his voice is rusty, his throat parched. The taste of Rey’s blood lingers in his mouth like a sweet dream. He thinks about walking barefoot through the desert, and the green that grew under his feet. _Every traveler with a heavy pack knows: balance is everything._ “It’s just a journey. And I just have to keep walking.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> Watchers go to good schools, Finn knows; old British schools like Oxford and Cambridge where they get Firsts in reading ancient texts and dead languages he's never heard of. Like Phoenicio-Punic. Finn can't conjugate a single verb of Phoenicio-Punic; he knows exactly nothing about Semitic language roots. But a principle is a principle, so the winner of the 2016 Cal State Northridge Modern Languages and Cultures Undergraduate Prize (for his re-translation of Volume 24 of _Kozure Ōkami)_ takes a deep breath and enters the chat.
> 
> * * *
> 
> With profuse thanks as always to [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/Bombastique1)), and additional thanks to everyone who is still reading for their patience and forbearance. I've found myself only able to write in little tiny chunks, but hopefully slow and steady will eventually finish, if not win, the race.


	17. Watcher, Slayer, Wound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **This time on _In All the World:_**  
>    
> He’s a Watcher. And the prophecy mentions a Watcher, and a Slayer. Nothing about an Inglewood boy with the bad luck to get bitten and the good luck to have Rose for a girlfriend. Why would it be about Finn? But he’s still got this _feeling._ And he doesn’t want to be a punk in a prophecy. He wants to go home and have some fluffernutters and read some asshole’s extremely wrong opinions about Naruto. But. The dream. Doesn’t Ben remember it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is very late. And I added another chapter. I apologize for being the worst.

**Me:** Where are you patrolling tonight?  
  
**Rey:** Going to Leah first are you still there?  
  
**Rey:** Are you okay?  
  


At first he thinks he just won’t answer. Then he thinks that’s probably the worst answer.

**Me:** I’m fine.  
  


When the light dies away, Leah opens the living room curtains, and the distant stars of Midtown and East Harlem shine in the dark, around the dark obstruction of the Cathedral. Ben paces the floor, slowly at first and then faster. He moves through the pain, like it’s water; he can’t get away from it, but he won’t let it stop him. It helps not to breathe. The more he lets his body forget its humanity, the less pain it feels.

He has to be able to fight. And he doesn’t want Rey to see.

* * *

On the uptown train, they talk hesitantly, in low, coded phrases, like they were guarding state secrets. It feels a little silly, on a subway, where nobody gives a fuck about anything. But not everybody on an evening subway car is a civilian, and Dr. Aphra’s not the only person in this city who’d sell Finn out for a Big Pharma payout.

“If you hurt yourself now, would you…?” Rose asks, her face folded into a frown.

Finn shakes his head. “I don’t think so. Usually I can sort of feel it. And I mean I can feel it now, but it feels… faint, I guess?”

“Do you think it will come back?” He lost so much blood he fainted. He’s always helped her, even when it was a huge danger to him, when he thought he could die on a New York street with his neck snapped by a vampire. Has he lost all his power to save himself? Did he give it all up for the sake of an evil French blonde who’s not even grateful?

 _(Ben would be grateful. If Finn could bring him back to life, Ben would be grateful, and Leah would be_ so _grateful, and Rey would – )_

“I don’t know,” Finn says slowly. He flexes his hands on his knees. His eyes close, and he breathes deeply in and out. After a second he cracks one eye open. “I can _feel_ you staring at me and it is _not_ making this easier.”

“Sorry,” Rey says guiltily, and looks away. She tries to focus on her own breathing, on the rattle-clack of the train, but her head feels like it’s vibrating and her stomach feels sick. She turns her phone over, but there aren’t any new texts since the last dozen times she checked. _I’m fine._ But he can’t be. Why did she even ask? She’s so stupid. _Thirteen years._ She can’t _be_ stupid. She has to be smart and fast and make it worth it – maybe she shouldn’t even be here – she should have gone straight to patrol – she could be fighting right now and they don’t really need her since it’s Finn who’s the important one here – Finn who could give Ben – 

Finn exhales in a huff. “I think,” he says slowly, “I think it’s coming back. Yeah. It’s coming back.”

* * *

“Us again!” says Rose at the door, high-pitched the way she gets when she’s nervous. “Sorry. We just – there was a lot going on and we didn’t have time to tell you everything and then Finn fainted and I didn’t really want to talk about it in front of Dr. Aphra – I mean, no offense, I know you guys are friends or whatever she’s just – she’s not still here, is she?”

Her head swivels left and right, eyes widening. Finn feels his lips twitch a little.

“I can’t smell her,” Rey says reassuringly.

“Oh, phew. Anyway, I _am_ sorry but we have a lot of questions and I just don’t feel comfortable putting them out on Witch Twitter, you know?”

Leah’s already pouring them tea. Kylo Ren is pacing in front of the dark windows, and Rey approaches him so cautiously you’d think she was worried about being bitten. Maybe she is. Everyone always said Slayers were delicious, and the jacket only mostly covers the scars. Finn’s stomach roils and turns over, remembering the warm slurp of blood in his mouth. It’s been months, but he can still taste it.

Then there’s warm tea in his hands and he tries to tell what happened. It was his idea; he’d explained it to Rose and Poe easily enough. Telling it in the past tense is harder, maybe because it was so fast and frightening and disorienting that he’s not sure what he really did. Maybe because his hand keeps restlessly returning to his pocket to touch the folded paper there.

“Then her eyes turned green-white. It wasn’t like it was for me. It just sort of… took her over. Rose could probably tell you the differences better.”

“Well, you weren’t mad at us for bringing you back, for one thing. But yeah. It wasn’t one big flash. It was more like it was playing minesweeper with her body.”

Rey is pretending not to look at Kylo. Kylo – Ben, he guesses – stares at the floor and grinds his heel into the carpet. He used to live here, when he was alive. Finn remembers what Phasma said about being alive, and being alone. Who was she, before she died the first time? Someone lonely, with no one to help her.

He knows who vampires choose to kill. He’s done it himself. You pick the ones who are vulnerable. The ones who are alone. It’s predation, pure and ruthless and unfair.

And has he been any fairer, picking Phasma out of the crowd, to be the one who lives again?

 _I got cursed and you got cured. Nothing gets dealt out evenly, does it?_ “I’m sorry,” he says, and Ben looks up, frowning.

“For what?”

“That I picked Phasma. Instead of you. I guess I wasn’t thinking.” Ben’s frown gets deeper. Finn wonders if his own frown looks a little like his vamp face, too. He saw Kylo’s vamp face a lot; he remembers it. But he never saw his own, of course. “I’m sorry. To you. And your – your mom.”

He can’t even look at Leah as he says it. He wishes his parents were still alive basically every day, but he’s still glad they didn’t live to see him die.

“Don’t be sorry,” Ben says gruffly. “If I were human I wouldn’t be able to fight like I can now. And if I were human, this – ” he gestures to a point on his chest “ – would probably be incapacitating.” Rey takes a hard breath, and Ben adds, “As it is it’s fine.”

Rey doesn’t look like she believes him.

“But say it comes back,” Finn continues. “And I can do it again. How do I choose? Who do I pick?”

“I saw you faint,” Leah says. “That was after a single transfusion, performed under carefully planned circumstances. I’m not sure you _should_ do it again.”

“Don’t I have to try? If I can?”

“You have had extraordinary experiences, and extraordinary powers. But you’re still mortal, Finn. You have to look after yourself.”

Rey’s twisting her fingers in her lap, and Rose puts her hand on Finn’s arm. “You do. You have to, Finn.”

He wants to. He’s so tired. He doesn’t love this fight like Rey does. And maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s stupid. But the feeling is so strong, lashing at him like a sandstorm, and if his dreams are going to be signs and portents or whatever, why not his random hunches? He takes out the paper, unfolds it, and holds it out. His one alteration sharpied in.

“I didn’t mean to take this. I swear I didn’t do it consciously. Sorry. But I saw it on your table and I got this – this really weird feeling about it.” Leah takes it from him, frowning, and Ben cranes his head to see. Rey’s still putting her fingers in knots.

 _“The Watcher will fall, and he will kill two fathers,”_ Leah reads, slowly. Her voice barely wavers. _“The Slayer will know him, and he will bring her down. He will take blood, and life, and a new and terrible wound will open.”_

“I don’t know that language; I don’t even know what language it is. Dr. Aphra said Phoenician, I think?”

“Phoenicio-Punic,” Ben says.

“Dr. Aphra said that word could mean _wound_ instead of _mouth._ And I just felt like – just had this feeling like – it was something to do with me.”

He feels like a fool as soon as he says it. Leah doesn’t even look at him. She’s looking at the paper, and at her son.

“A wound,” Ben says. “I offered a wound. That would make the whole thing fit.” 

He’s a Watcher. And the prophecy mentions a Watcher, and a Slayer. Nothing about an Inglewood boy with the bad luck to get bitten and the good luck to have Rose for a girlfriend. Why would it be about Finn? But he’s still got this _feeling._ And he doesn’t want to be a punk in a prophecy. He wants to go home and have some fluffernutters and read some asshole’s extremely wrong opinions about Naruto. But. The dream. Doesn’t Ben remember it?

“If it _were_ your wound in the prophecy… it would be somewhat unique, in the Knossos Codex,” Leah says. “I can’t think of another prophecy which concerns only one individual.”

“It’s about Rey, too.”

“Yes. But usually the prophecies laid out in the Knossos are things which have significant ripples in the demonic world. It’s possible that ‘mouth’ is the correct interpretation, and that it refers to an event we have yet to see happen.”

“Let me see,” Ben demands and takes the paper from her. “What about ‘terrible?’ How can a wound be terrible to anybody but an individual?”

“Ask the Fisher King,” his mother says drily. Finn’s memory suggests a pretty meh episode of _Doctor Who,_ which is probably not what she meant. Ben says something about consonant roots in parallel Semitic languages.

Watchers go to good schools, Finn knows; old British schools like Oxford and Cambridge where they get Firsts in reading ancient texts and dead languages he's never heard of. Like Phoenicio-Punic. Finn can't conjugate a single verb of Phoenicio-Punic; he knows exactly nothing about Semitic language roots. But a principle is a principle, so the winner of the 2016 Cal State Northridge Modern Languages and Cultures Undergraduate Prize (for his re-translation of Volume 24 of _Kozure Ōkami_ ) takes a deep breath and enters the chat.

“Listen, I’m sorry if I’m reading this wrong, but it’s all just third-person verbs without any punctuation or capitalization, right?” he asks. “And like I’m guessing there’s something that puts ‘Watcher’ and ‘Slayer’ into subject positions instead of object ones, but like… a new and terrible wound will open. Not _be opened,_ right? Just open. So this new and terrible wound is in a subject position too, right? Or no?”

“No, that’s correct,” Leah says, frowning.

“I feel like… I had these dreams. Where I was together with Rey, and. Ben.” Part of him still expects to have his throat ripped out for using Kylo Ren’s human name. “So he’s the Watcher, I guess, and she’s the Slayer, and I think I might be…” He rubs his wrist. There’s no scar, but he remembers the pain. The dizziness, the nausea, the fear. “I think I might be the wound.”

 _“Finn,”_ Rey says, like she sorry, like she never would have wanted this for him and she doesn’t want it to be true. But Ben’s look is straight and serious, and his eyes are wide. 

Rose is distraught. “Finn. But you’re not – what’s going to happen, to make you terrible?”

He doesn’t know Phoenicio-Punic, but it doesn’t matter what language you’re translating from: the principles are the same. “Who wrote this?” he asks. “Terrible from whose perspective? Because – ”

“Hannimot of Tyre wrote the prophecies,” Ben says, closing his eyes. “He was a vampire seer.”

“It was pretty terrible to Phasma. To be brought back to life. If I did it to more vampires – if I could keep doing it – that could have some ripples. In the demon world.”

“That’s true,” Leah says slowly. “It’s… an entirely different mode of engaging with vampires. To cure the human, instead of slaying the demon. And it could have some ripples, yes.” She looks between all their faces with troubled eyes. “I can hardly say what kind.”

* * *

The grass around Turtle Pond is icy, and it crackles under Rey’s boots. So much for stealth. Not that she’s being very stealthy anyway. It’s hard to even keep her eyes focused on the shadows.

She’s the Slayer. She kills vampires. It’s the only way to keep people safe. Unless it isn’t. Unless every vampire is a rescue case who hasn’t been rescued. And every pile of ash she’s dusted off her clothes is a human being who might have had a chance to live again, if she hadn’t cut them off.

There’s something moving, just behind, and the cold winter wind carries the smell of a strange demon. She charges through the ice and slush towards that smell, just on instinct, and crashes shoulder-first into the vampire. It grabs for her hair and she head-butts it in the chin. It staggers backwards, and she pulls back her sword, ready to lop off it’s head –

Except it’s not an _it,_ it’s a _him,_ a young human man in a puffer coat with his life and soul stolen from him and a demon dragging his body around. And if she cuts off his head now, he’ll never get them back. But maybe Finn could save him, maybe he has parents – 

He explodes is a shower of dust. Ben’s standing behind him, stake in hand and a frown on his long, pale face. “Rey? You froze. Are you all right?”

“Am I all right? Am _I_ all right?” She drops her arm, and her sword point sinks into the soggy ground. “I can’t save them. All I can do is kill them.”

His frown gets deeper. “When you kill them, you’re saving other people. You know that.”

She turns away. It’s just the two of them, tonight; Finn’s gone home with Rose, to recover, and Poe has babysitting duty in Parkchester. “Great. Very pumped to spend every night in the trolley problem, only worse.”

“I don’t understand,” he says, frowning. His long legs let him keep even with her.

“There’s another option,” she says, sniffling in the cold. “Before I killed them because the human was dead, and all that was left was a monster. But maybe the human isn’t dead. Maybe Finn could save them. Only I have to kill them permanently, so they don’t go killing other people?”

He takes that in, forehead still creased in a frown. “I don’t think it’s that ethically complicated. Finn couldn’t have saved that one tonight, and if I hadn’t killed him just now, he would have killed other people, and made them vampires who would kill too. Probably a lot of people, before Finn’s able to save even one person again. It’s an exponential loss of life, and you’re preventing it.”

“It just sucks,” she says, miserable. The wind is cutting right through her knit hat, and her nose is cold. “It sucks that there’s a way to save some of them, but only some of them get saved, and the rest I kill. I want to be a good Slayer.” _I am trying so hard, to be a good Slayer for you._ “But how can I be so – ”

“So what?” Ben prompts softly.

She tucks her gloved hands into her armpits. “I guess before I felt like – you know how you said that the Western Council thought the Slayer was like, an angel or something? I mean I didn’t feel like an angel. But I felt – good. That prophecy you said about me, the really old one, about Slayers. Standing against the forces of darkness. I felt like I was really doing something good.”

“You are.”

“But I’m not – if I’m doing this bad thing, taking away this person’s hope that they could even come back, I shouldn’t enjoy it. Even if I’m doing it to save other people. And… I do enjoy it.”

“It’s in your nature, to fight demons.”

“So I’m not _fighting the good fight._ I’m just like one of those wolves they let loose in Yellowstone so the caribou don’t get too many diseases. Just a different kind of animal.”

“So? It’s still good, what you do. It still saves people’s lives.”

“But how can you do – ?”

His frown deepens. “How can I do what?”

“How can you do _so much,_ give up _so much_ for me, if I’m just a dumb animal who likes killing things?” It comes out as a wail. She wants to pound on his chest, for the way he stands there looking _puzzled_ at her, but his chest is where the pain is. 

“You’re not a dumb animal. You’re a person.”

“Aren’t I _sick_ person, then? If I like killing things so much?”

“You don’t have to be an angel to fight against the forces of darkness. If you did… ” He gestures deprecatingly at himself, and her eyes are drawn back to his chest, to the invisible wound, and an idea occurs to her.

“If my blood can make you stronger or whatever, could it make you… feel better?”

“What?”

“If you drank from me again, would it help with the pain?” She can do something for him. She can make it better.

“Rey, you can’t – ” He stops walking, and when she stops too, he takes a step back. Avoiding her. “You can’t offer me that.”

“Why not?”

“I’m – the – ” He claws at his hair with his fingers. “It makes me weak. Not physically but – Rey, you can’t offer to hurt yourself for me.”

“You hurt yourself for me.”

“It’s different. I’m your Watcher.”

“Yeah, so you’re _my_ Watcher. Why can’t I help you?” She shoulders off her coat, and he takes another step back. “I was fine last time.”

“You weren’t. The blood loss probably made you more vulnerable to the drug – ”

“So I’ll make sure not to get drugged – ”

“Rey. Rey, I won’t be able to stop. Don’t tempt me.” He’s turning away from her, hiding his face and putting more distance between them. She raises her sword and slashes a line across the inside of her hand.

“Look. I won’t die of bleeding from my palm.” She can hear his face change. His shoulders are tense. She knows he can smell it. Red drops appear on the snow by her feet. “It’s dripping on the ground. If you don’t drink it it’s just going to go to _waste.”_

He roars. The distance between them collapses before she can blink and his hands are like cold iron forcing her palm to his mouth. She can feel the press of his fangs as he sucks ravenously. He stops a quarter of a second to lap sloppily with his chilly, famished tongue at the runnel that first ran down her fingers and then the suction is back, so hard it hurts. He’s outpaced the capacity of her veins. “Stop – ” she starts to say, and then one hand is in her hair, cruel and hard, and his fangs are at her throat.

He throws her down in the snow and hurls himself backwards against a tree. His feet thrash, churning slush, as he fights to get his human face back on. _“Why – Rey – ”_

“Did it help?” she demands. “Did it make you hurt less?”

“Yes – no – _why are you doing this?”_

“How can I pay you back?” It starts as a shout and it ends as a sob. “You’re hurting, all the time, for thirteen years. How can I make it worth it? How can I make it _stop?”_

“Rey,” he says. He gets up, like he wants to go to her, and then he presses his back against the tree again. “Rey, I almost killed you. Just now. I almost killed you in the elevator. I _wanted_ to. I’m a monster. You don’t owe me anything.”

“Except my life. And my soul, that time on Halloween; let’s not forget about that, either. What else is there _to_ owe; what can I owe more than that?”

 _“You_ don’t owe _me._ I’m trying.” His face twists, and his hand goes to his chest again. “I’m trying to – I can’t make it up. The things I’ve done wrong – it’s not a debt I can pay. But you’ve done so much for me.” He closes his eyes. “So much.”

“What have I ever done? Bring you a rabbit?”

He laughs, a sad, drunk sound. “I’m a monster. I wouldn’t even have died, if you’d just left me there. But you took care of me. You keep taking care of me. You let me touch you. Let me watch you when I make you come. You _trust_ me.”

“So?”

“I don’t deserve it. But you gave it to me anyway. I’m not who I used to be. But you made me feel like the thing I always wanted to be.” He exhales, a long breath, not warm enough to fog the air, and his eyes shine in the dark. “Your Watcher.”

“I want to be a good Slayer for you,” she says, trying not to sniffle. The snow is soaking her jeans. “I just don’t know anymore if a Slayer is a good thing to be.”

He stoops down in front of her. The shine in his eyes is tears; they’re beading at the corners, soaking into his lashes. “It’s who you are. Please, Rey. I understand – why you feel that way. I could tell you again about the lives you’re saving, if you want that. Because you are saving lives. But I just want you to – please. Please never be ashamed of who you are.” 

He offers her his cool, strong hand to help her to her feet. And then he freezes. He’s not looking at her. 

“Please, go ahead of me,” he says. His voice is unsteady. “Please go on ahead. Without me.” His throat works. “Please go.” She takes one step, and then, like he’s been pushed, he falls to his knees, and snatches at the reddened snow where her blood fell with trembling fingers. “Please. I’m the only one here who ought to be ashamed. Please go.”

He’s begging. She turns her face away and starts to walk, but she can hear the sounds he makes.

* * *

Rose is making him tea. Except, Finn is hearing, it’s not really tea. “It’s a tisane of a couple different things I picked up at a botánica uptown; there’s no actual tea leaves so there’s no caffeine so it’s still hydrating because there’s no diuretic effect. Oh and there’s some lemongrass I got from the greencart on the corner. And some stuff from Canal. Hopefully it should just be kind of tart, like, flavor-wise? You can put sugar in it though, if it tastes bad!”

The kettle whistle interrupts her, and she clicks the gas off and slowly pours the water through the strainer with the herbs in it. She’s making it in the pyrex measuring cup, and when she has exactly a cup and a half, she holds it up to the light to inspect the color. Frowning, she closes her eyes and mutters something, and the tea turns several shades darker.

It is tart. Also bitter. He could definitely use some sugar. But Rose is watching him anxiously, so he just sips, and nods, and smiles. Tries to relax. To recover.

He almost doesn’t want to recover. Part of him is very selfish and very tired, and it wants to lie on the couch and have Rose bring him hot drinks all the time from here on out, even if the drinks are bitter, because this is so, so much better than going out in the cold and fighting vampires who want to kill him. Or thinking about how to choose who’s going to live and who’s going to die in a shower of dust.

Rose puts on GBBO and puts his feet in her lap on the couch. “I could make that,” she says idly, of some steamed buns or something. “Should I make that?”

“Mmm.” Finn wants to be listening. He wants to have answers. Instead he has dread and that lead-heavy sense of duty. And Rose is looking at him with the worry-line between her brows, and that weighs on him too. He takes a long drink from the cooling mug. “Just trying to focus on healing,” he says apologetically. Rose bats lightly at his foot, and the worry-line fades. But it doesn’t disappear.

* * *

professor watcher lady  
  
**professor watcher lady:** Rey, can you come by this evening before patrol? I have something important to discuss with you.  
  
**Me:** Sure. 4:30 ok?  
  
**professor watcher lady:** Yes, that’s fine.  
  
**Me:** Sorry I might be late a job came up and I really need it is 5 ok?  
  
**professor watcher lady:** At your convenience, Rey.  
  


She’s a little anxious in the elevator up. That’s because Leah said it was important. Not because Ben might be there, staying at his mother’s place. Not because every time she gets in an elevator she thinks of Ben, making her watch herself in the mirror over his shoulder, making a show of her and how she looks getting eaten out and fucked and made to come. Not because every time she breathes in the stale air of an elevator she feels an aftershock of terror and pleasure and pain.

It’s just an elevator. She snakes her hand under her collar and scratches at the scar. It looks punk, Rose says. She sees it in the mirror, getting in and out of showers, and she thinks of his mouth. 

_Did it help? Did it make you hurt less?_

_Yes – no –_

And the hungry, wretched sound of him eating bloodied snow.

She tries to brush it off, in the hall, and in the apartment, Leah puts tea and lemon and two cookies for her on the table. Rey tries to make the cookies last. She sort of manages. It smells like Ben is there, but she doesn’t hear him and she certainly doesn’t see him. Maybe he was here and he just left. There’s still sunshine, but there’s an unground garage here, and maybe sewer access – maybe he is here and he just doesn’t want to see her. She tries to focus, but the scent of him stalks restlessly through her brain as she sits and tries to answer Leah’s questions.

“Yeah,” she says. “I’ve actually been eating pretty well this week. Rose said Finn needed more iron-rich foods so I got to eat all the perishables that weren’t iron-rich.”

“I see,” Leah says, and takes a deep breath. “Rey, how much do you know about the negotiation for your… for the artifact which revived you?”

She’d forgotten. Thirteen years of pain had overshadowed it, and made her forget, but – Rey can feel the tension headache coming on, the smothering feeling of _more debt._ “Sixty thousand dollars?” she says weakly.

She knows it’s sixty-one, and it’s cowardly to lowball, but she can’t help it. Does she have to pay it back? Does the Watchers’ Council know about her other loans? Can they garnish her wages when she doesn’t have wages? Are they going to withhold Wesley’s pension money? She needs that thousand a month; she’ll never pay her share of the rent without – 

“I am guilty of a small initial… untruth,” Leah says. Rey just looks at her, dazed, trying to calculate how she’s going to survive this. “I may have told the Council that Aphra’s demand was seventy thousand dollars.”

“Why?” Rey asks, stupefied. She feels like someone is holding her head underwater. _If I sleep on the couch, Finn and Rose can sublet my room to someone – it’s furnished, so maybe they can charge for that and I can – but nobody’s paying a 10% surcharge just for an old bed –_

“Because you shouldn’t be hungry,” Leah says, and slides a slip of paper across the table. It’s a check. With Rey’s name on it. For nine thousand dollars.

“The rest took a little more effort,” Leah is saying. Rey stares at the check. Her eyes sting. It’s hard to breathe through her nose. “Rupert was correct that the Council under Quentin’s leadership was not eager to listen to him, and of course Ben himself is not… in good standing. But some of the ideas he holds about Slayers are compatible with the pet theories of certain Watchers who _are_ well-placed to influence the Council. And Rupert is quite adept at playing on scholarly vanity.”

This is literal gibberish to Rey. _Nine thousand dollars?_ “Thank you,” she whispers.

“Don’t thank me, thank Rupert. Your salary will be sixty-five thousand dollars annually, payable on a quarterly basis. Beginning January 1, 2019.”

_“What?”_

“If they can pay to save you from death, they can pay to keep you alive.” Leah smiles, just a little. “I suspect they may have been influenced by Ben’s threat to revive some of the Council’s more divisive cultural quarrels. In some parts of West Africa and the Caribbean, for example, Watchers are traditionally expected to raise Potentials from childhood onwards, and the stipend for that was part of the midcentury negotiations for the Council’s reunification. A living wage for a New York City Slayer is somewhat higher, of course, but – Rey. Rey, don’t cry. Oh, sweetheart. Let me get you a tissue.”

It’s too much. Nine thousand. And then _sixty-five thousand dollars a year._ That’s like a staff editorial job. That’s rent money. That’s loan-payment money. That’s _two grocery bags_ money. Like buying cheese instead of just eating samples, cheese and bread and chips and chicken and bananas and frozen blueberries and baby tomatoes and – Leah called her _sweetheart_ and – 

“Here. Blow your nose. You can’t fight vampires with a runny nose.”

Rey blows her nose. “Thank you,” she says thickly. “Thank you so much.”

“You risk your life to save the world. Surely we should be thanking you.”

“No. No. I mean.” It is a job, isn’t it? She does work hard. So why does she feel like she doesn’t deserve it? “Thank you.”

“I’m sure you were wondering where Ben is – ”

“No,” Rey says instantly, like the extremely shitty liar she is.

“Yes, you were.” Leah tilts her chin, looking at Rey over her glasses. “I’m wondering too. He didn’t come back here last night.”

He didn’t? But it smells so much like him. “Why?”

“Maybe he didn’t want to. He’s an adult, after all. But I did wonder. Rey, did anything happen last night? Between you?”

“I tried to help him,” Rey says, picking at the edge of her dirty tissue. “Because he’s in pain. He shouldn’t have done that. Just for me.”

“Watchers have done worse for Slayers.” Rey does not find this, or the way Leah says it – distant, bleak, dismissive, like something she doesn’t want to think about – particularly comforting. “Rey. I know you’ve… been intimate with him.”

 _Been intimate._ If she thinks about it for even half a second she can feel him inside her, tongue and fingers and cock. And teeth; if she thinks about it she feels him sucking out what’s inside her, making her heart beat harder as he pulls her into himself. _He held me harder the more he drank, and I was so scared, and so safe._

“Yeah. But he didn’t lose his soul. Don’t worry.” Her chest aches. Buffy made Angel happy, but she doesn’t make Ben happy. It’s for the best, isn’t it? She doesn’t want him to lose his soul. (She’s not good enough. She’s too old, too messy, too dirty, a delusional castoff of junkie parents with no career but killing. He doesn’t love her.)

Leah sighs, and looks down at her hands, twining her fingers together. “There’s a strong temptation for me to try to interfere. To lie to you, or him. Or tell you too much truth. But the more you try to control these things, the worse it goes with everyone.” _These things?_ Rey wonders. Leah pushes herself to her feet. “So, all I’ll say is. Be careful. With him. With yourself.” 

So her broken heart is that obvious, huh. “Can he tell?” she asks, in a small voice.

Leah scrubs her brow with her sleeve. “Do you know, Han spent three months thinking Luke was my boyfriend?”

“I thought Luke was your brother?”

“He is. Was. What I’m saying is, there are certain elements of the Szolo character that not even two decades of the world’s most elite education and _literal clairvoyance_ can efface. He’s dim, Rey. Forgive him.”

Well, that’s something, anyway. If she has hope to hide it from him, she has hope to hide it from herself. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s not like I really wanted to talk about it with him.”

Leah tilts her head, a strange expression on her face. “I don’t want to interfere, but – perhaps that’s wise.” Her hand rests on Rey’s hair, small and light as an autumn leaf. “Good hunting, my dear. Be careful.”

* * *

Lorontha demons are attracted to the smell of spruce; in ancient northern Europe, mortals trying to call on them would burn bowls full of hemp on spruce altars to draw their favor and focus. Usually they had a pile of offal, or a sacrificial goat waiting for the demon once it appeared.

Which means that a Christmas tree seller who lights up a joint on the sly is basically begging for a visit from something ten feet high with three heads and 900 teeth who's really _deeply_ disappointed by what’s on offer.

“Stomach!” Ben shouts, dragging it by its back foot. Shouting is hard; he has to take deep breaths, and the invisible wound in his chest aches. “It’s got a vulnerable stomach!”

“Heard you the first thirty times!” Rey yells, slightly muffled as she rolls to avoid a blow from razor-sharp claws. “Don’t they breed any cuddly, toothless demons?” But he can hear that her sword is making contact, and the demon is howling. He holds its leg as firmly as he can while she guts it.

“That’ll teach you to smoke on the job,” Ben says grimly to the Christmas tree guy, who’s huddled behind his little shack as they drag the corpse to a dumpster. 

“Don’t blame your dealer for this,” Rey adds, as the man looks blankly down at the stub of a joint in his hand. “Totally normal cheap weed.”

Ben’s grateful for the skunky smell of the joint, the fresh spruce, even the gory smell of the dead demon. All of it helps cover the smell of Rey, her blood so close and hot.

They patrol west, stalking a complicated mess of footpaths that might maybe let a really patient person get to the river, though Rey grumbles that you probably have to be pure of heart and really good at cardinal directions. Small groups of people cluster around fires, or huddle in tents, staring at them, and his Slayer’s instincts haven’t lead her wrong tonight: four vampires are strolling down the walk towards them, eyeing the humans like they’re a deli case.

They smell him before they smell her. “There’s enough to share,” one of them says, grudgingly. “I call dibs on the guy in the plaid, though.”

“No sharing,” Rey says, lifting her sword. “And I got dibs on all you fuckers.”

When they’re all ash and several of the people who’d been at campfires have decided to find other places to sit, she runs her whetstone over her blade, and he asks her, for probably the sixth time tonight, “Are you warm enough?” 

A line of sweat glistens over her eyebrow, under the brim of her hat. “You tell me,” she says, and bites her lip.

He licks his. She smells like victory, violence, sweat, spruce, and cinnamon. She smells like sex. “Do you need it?” he asks her, his voice dropping low as he steps closer.

She turns away from him. “Not if it’s going to hurt you. I can take care of myself.”

“I’m not an _invalid,_ Rey,” he snarls.

“And I’m not a fucking _chore,”_ she snaps back, and runs.

He chases her. It suppresses the pain in his chest. He can run down the Slayer; he can catch her and – and then he does catch her, against the rolled-down steel shutter of a Russian market, and her eyes are angry and wet. The wound throbs. “What are you talking about, chores?”

“That’s how you keep talking about it! How I _need_ it, like you’re feeding your fish!”

This is _nonsense;_ what is she _talking_ about? Like he hasn’t been hard for her since the first time he saw her in person, his Slayer making her first kill in the Brooklyn street. “Are you serious?”

“I don’t want it if you’re only doing it because you think I _need_ it.” She turns away. Her tucked-down chin shows him the bare back of her neck, under her messy bun.

“Maybe _I_ need it,” he says, to her nape, the soft fine hairs he wants to brush his lips over. Because he can’t say, _I like to pretend you need me._

She half-turns towards him. And he’s not wrong that she’s hot and itching; he knows he’s not. “Would that – help?”

It won’t do a thing for the pain in his chest. Every time she touches him, the human and the demon in him come to high tide at once, everything he feels he feels too much. But he can smell her and he should be kissing her already. “Yes.”

Maybe it will help, after all. Fry his brain past the point of pain. He takes her by the wrist and drags her to the first open door. Some kind of cafe. He doesn’t care. It’s out of the wind.

“Guys; sorry, guys, we’re closing,” says the woman behind the counter, and then meets his eyes.

“You didn’t see us,” he tells her. “You’re going to turn out the lights and lock the door. Leave the key in the door. In an hour, you’ll remember and come back for it.”

Rey stares at him. He keeps his grip around her wrist and pulls her in front of him as the woman obeys, and they’re left in the dark shop.

“What was that?” she asks.

“It never worked on you,” he says, and kisses her. For a split second she resists, and then her teeth graze his tongue and she’s climbing him, her legs wrapped around his waist, so she can kiss him harder. He staggers behind the counter, where no one will look through the dark window and see him dragging off his clothes for her, pulling off her hat so her can pet her hair as she kisses his chest. Behind her back, he presses his hands agains the steam wand so they won’t be cold on her skin.

“That’s right,” he sighs. “Kiss it better.” Maybe she could. But she thinks he’s mocking her. She bites him, and he lunges forward with a groan and pins her to the counter. Some sample plate of scones or something clatters to the floor, and Rey makes a noise of protest. 

He kisses her again, making her breathe her living breath into his lungs. It tastes like hunger. He pops the button on her jeans and peels them down her hips. Everything smells like coffee and her. When he gets his steam-warm hand between her legs she whimpers and he bends down over her to put his lips by her ear.

“Don’t give me your blood, Rey,” he whispers. His fingers slide over her, into her; she turns her head and presses her cheek against his. “I’m a monster. I’ll kill you. Just give me this.” Her mouth opens and shuts, wordless, and he can’t resist the temptation to brush it with his as he opens his pants. She nuzzles up against him, arms around his neck, and he inhales her scent, sweet and hot. “Just this,” he murmurs, pushing into her. “Oh. Fuck. Oh fuck. Just this.”

The scar of his bite is white and raised on her throat. When he licks it she squirms, and demonic heat burns in his veins. He’s tasted her. His teeth are stamped into the Slayer’s skin. She rolls her hips against his, and he shifts his stance, pressing her legs back so he can go deeper. She gasps, and he breathes it in. He wants to hurt her, eat her, please her, make her come. Make her love him. He pounds her harder and moans her name, and her arms tighten around his neck.

“Be careful,” she pleads, and he stops.

“Am I – are you – ”

She’s flushed all over; her eyes are feverishly bright. “Don’t stop. You don’t have to be gentle. But – be careful. Please.”

He keeps her where she is, pinned on the length of his cock, and runs his hands over her. She flutters around him, and when he runs lightly her clit she jolts. It makes him shudder. “So good,” he says, low. He can be careful. Doesn’t he care? Too much, too much.

He strokes her, little, precise strokes, and her cunt squeezes and squeezes him. “That’s right. That’s good. I’ll be careful with you. Look how careful.” She likes it best when he strokes bottom-to-top, right-to-left. That’s what makes her clench so hard his eyes water. “Come on my cock.” He thrusts a little; he can’t help it. Can’t help kissing her throat, her mouth, her eyes, as she clenches his cock and his hips move faster. “So good, so good, so _fucking_ good.”

 _“Careful,”_ she says again, higher. She’s coming. Her nails dig into his back. He loves her so much, and she sobs out, “Careful, careful, careful,” as he makes her come. He thinks he understands.

“Don’t worry,” he slurs. His chest hurts. It doesn’t matter. Her cunt feels like heaven. He kisses her mouth. “Don’t worry. Just don’t love me.” Her whole body goes tense; he thinks she’s coming again, and he groans and buries himself inside her. “Oh God. Don’t love me, Rey.” He doesn’t expect her to be listening; he barely knows he’s speaking, his brain so blasted with the relish of filling her up. “You’ll destroy my soul.”

He lays his head against her neck for a moment, warming his hands on the imperfect happiness of her body, her pleasure. The pain in his chest throbs. He ignores it, breathing in the smell of her sweat. After a moment, it penetrates his post-orgasmic haze that she’s still tense. He straightens. “What’s wrong?”

She sits up slowly, pulling her coat around her like a blanket, and she looks at him. “You don’t want me to love you… because of your soul?”

“Don’t… don’t worry about,” he says, retrieving her hat for her. 

“Too late. What are you talking about?” She sitting up on the counter, her pants around her ankles and her shoulders tight.

He pulls his shirt back on. “It’s not an orgasm that triggers the curse. It’s happiness. Happiness is what I have to be afraid of, if I don’t want to lose my soul.”

“And if I loved you, you’d be happy?”

Ben looks at her. In the dark her eyes are huge and feverishly bright. Her chest heaves. Something prickles inside him, green and growing. Something bright and warm rises. He wants to hold it. Belong to it. 

“Ben. Do you love me?” she asks, her voice thin and small, and he realizes that the word for what he’s feeling is _hope._

Cold dread pours over him. _Hope and love and trust._ Is this how it happens? The look on her face – but that’s the same mistake he always made with Tai. Another person’s face is a foreign language, and there’s always a nuance you miss, a phrase you willfully mishear. He can’t read her mind, and if he tries to read her face, he’ll read with hope and find the thing he wants to find

He takes one step forward and slips his hand over her mouth. She doesn’t resist. Maybe she can feel how hard he’s shaking. “Rey,” he says. “You slurp your hot chocolate. You swagger when you carry that sword. You fuck me like I’ve stolen something and you want it back. I love you. You’re just the only one for me. Only one in all the world. Don’t cry.” Glinting lines of tears are falling from her eyes, and he kisses them. “I wish I could get old with you. I want every line on your face to be a line on mine. I want you to love me. More than anything. And if I ever think you do, I’ll – I’ll turn into something you would hate. And I can’t – Rey, I can’t – ” His voice chokes away. Warm fingers brush his face, touch the cold water in his eyes. He makes himself finish. “I couldn’t stand it. I’m so afraid. Don’t let me, Rey. Please don’t let me – be that to you.”

He closes his eyes. Her fingertips stroke over his lids. She’s breathing hard against his hand. And then she slips away from him. He stays where he is for a long moment. He hopes she’ll kiss him, and he’s so afraid of what will happen if she does. He hears her clothes rustle as she puts them back on, and the hope ebbs. 

His heart aches, and the wound that isn’t there aches. But he’s not empty. Something like peace comes to fill him up. _Balance,_ says a voice in his head, old and calm. It’s okay. It’s okay. He opens his eyes.

Rey is dressed, standing in front of him with her hat and coat, and her sword sheathed on her back. She looks at him steadily “Don’t worry,” she says gently. “I’ll keep you safe.”

He believes her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next time on _In All the World:_**
> 
> “Got it,” Poe says. “So him and me, we take down the other two, and Rey and Rose hold her down for you? That the plan?”
> 
> “Sure,” says Rey, because anything that involves hitting things sounds like a plan to Rey.
> 
> “Count of three,” Poe says. Finn fumbles for his knife. “Three… two… one-go!”
> 
> * * *
> 
> The Fisher King is a figure of Arthurian-adjacent myth who is wounded in the leg or the groin, and whose land suffers with him. _Kozure Ōkami,_ usually translated as _Lone Wolf and Cub_ is a famous manga about a lone ronin and his young son. It's an acknowledged influence on _The Mandalorian._
> 
> With thanks as always to [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique) ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/Bombastique1)) for reading and for listening to me when I whine about writer's block.


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